The thing that made me tense the most was that I still didn’t know exactly what they planned to do.
Give her a scare was such a general term, and was open to vast interpretation. Seeing their pallid faces made me fear the worst.
I had a feeling this was the last time I’d be one-on-one with one of them. Bob had a gun but this was a chance I needed to take.
I lunged at him, and I caught him by surprise, spearing him to the ground.
Then there was a gun shot, so loud it temporarily deafened me.
I remember hearing Natalie’s voice before I hit the ground, but I couldn’t make out what she said before I felt a blow to my head, and everything went black.
27
Natalie
“How badly did you hurt him?”
I glanced in the back of the truck. I was sitting in the middle seat of Jared’s pickup truck as they drove me God knows where.
I thought about somehow leaning into Jared’s lap, causing a crash, and making a run for it, but I was reluctant since Bob was poking a gun in my side.
“Here’s the thing, Sweetheart. You don’t ask the questions. You answer ours.”
“Real original. I don’t know what you two want, but can’t we figure something out?”
Jared laughed. “You sound like Shaney. He went so soft since you came back.”
“Nah, let’s be honest,” Bob chimed in. “He’s been soft all this past year.”
I glanced at Shane, looking lifeless in the back. They’d duct-taped his hands and legs together and put tape over his mouth for good measure.
“What are you doing with Shane?”
Jared kept his eyes on the road. “You just don’t worry about Shane. Bobby, I’m starting to fade. Will you give me another?”
“Sure thing.”
Bob reached into the glove box and pulled out a pill, then gave it to Jared. He tossed it into his mouth, threw it back, and swallowed.
I racked my brain for a way to get out of this. This situation seemed impossible. Crazy. Unreal.
It was like I was living through an episode of the podcast I liked to listen to about murderers.
I didn’t know if murder was their intent. They hadn’t exactly made it clear. I took deep breaths and tried not to panic. But this certainly looked grim, like I was at their whim.
I couldn’t even see any distinguishing landmarks outside on the roads, the snow was piled so high.
So I took a deep breath, feeling the gun in my side, and I did the only thing I could think of.
I closed my eyes and I prayed.
I prayed to all the gods I had ever believed in. I prayed to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And I prayed to my dad. That if he was out there, up there somewhere, he’d help me.
The truck came to a halt.
“We’re here,” Jared said.
“Come on,” Bob said, grabbing my elbow. I stumbled getting out of the truck.
“You might have been here a time or two. Have you?” Jared asked.
I glanced up at the giant sign in front of me.
TOFT COAL MINE
I didn’t say anything. If this was their plan to torture me, I wasn’t going to give them any extra satisfaction that they were apparently getting from this.
“Never heard of it,” I seethed.
“Hey, you going to just leave him in there?” Bob asked, nodding his head back toward the truck.
“He was barely moving. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s dead or dying with how hard you pistol whipped him.”
“Fuck, man. We killed him?”
“You killed him.”
Jared’s laughter sent chills down the back of my spine. I noted that although Bob had the gun and had been the one to knock Shane in the head, he seemed to have more empathy. Or maybe Bob was just slightly less drugged out. I couldn’t tell for sure. And what did it really matter? They were both monsters who apparently didn’t mind leaving their former friend for dead. But I needed to find an opening to reason with them, if there was any hope at all. It was hard to believe this was a life or death situation.
I turned back to look at the truck.
Please, don’t be dead Shane. I know I saw you breathing back there. Come on. Pull through.
“Let’s head into the mine, shall we?” Jared said. “Nice and warm in there, anyway.”
The mine had closed down a few years ago, so the equipment was rusty but operational.
They didn’t have much trouble breaking in. I guessed this wasn’t the first time they’d done it.
They both put headlamps on and ushered me into the mine shaft elevator, and we headed down.
“They’re thinking about turning this thing into a museum,” Jared said. “I think it should be a memorial for the seventeen.”
As we went down—the mine shaft elevator seemed to move ever so slow, a sinking feeling crept into me further.
“Yeah, a memorial…for her,” Bob added, then laughed.
“Good one man. Real original,” Jared quipped.
There was an odd power dynamic at play between the two of them. I searched for ways I could use that dynamic to my advantage, maybe pit them against each other in some way. But it seemed like a long shot.
The elevator shaft stopped, and they opened the doors into the pitch black.
Bob pushed me, and I resisted.
“What do you two want from me? Money? We’ll get you all the money I have in my bank account. You want to torture me? Make me scared? Well congratulations. I’m fucking scared.”
I looked back and forth at their faces in the dim light of the depths of the mine.
“Scared. Scarred. Money. Yes. We want a little of everything, Sweet Pea.”
My skin crawled when he said that.
Sweet Pea was the nick name my father used to have for me. How did Jared know that?
“Walk,” Bob said. “Don’t make me say it again.”
I hesitated, then decided I would do as he said.
My skin flushed, and I wanted to fight them so badly. I clenched and unclenched my hands. I thought of the self-defense class my mother had made me take when I was in high school.
I’d gotten one good blow in on Jared when he found me in the closet.
Bob was the one with the gun, but he seemed reluctant to use it.
“Let’s fucking move it,” Bob poked the gun into my side, lifting up the material of my sweater. It was all I had on, but due to the adrenaline rushing through me, I barely felt the cold.
I walked forward, but couldn’t escape the sense that I was walking toward my own doom. There was an eerie energy in the mine.
“You know why the mine closed down, don’t you?”
“It stopped being profitable.”
“Yes, but do you know why?”
A chair appeared from out of the pitch black darkness from their headlamps.
They sat me down in it, and I heard Jared roll out the duct tape he had with him.
“Ran out of coal.”
“Well, that’s not exactly true,” Bob said. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. I could barely see the shadow of his jaw moving as he spoke. “Sure, they had mined out the easy coal. Hell, coal sure don’t come easy in Michigan to begin with. They were shocked in the first place that they found any here at all.”
Jared and he both had a good laugh at that. I didn’t see the humor.
“But the real reason the mine shut down,” Jared went on, “Was that the workers who went down here got spooked after the accident happened. Workers who went to the deepest level said they were seeing ghosts. They’d get up to the normal level and quit on the spot. One of the miner’s hair even turned stark white.”
Bob laughed. “They said the ghost even wore a respirator. Looks real freaky in the dark, like some kind of human-size insect.”
I trembled as Jared finished duct-taping me to the chair. My shoulders were tight, and he’d wrapped so much tape around me I felt like a mummy. I started to shake.
Absolute darkness is something to behold. My adrenaline spiked. Suddenly, I felt hypersensitive to every little noise of their shoes treading on the dirt.
Then all of the noise stopped for a few minutes. I wondered if somehow they had taken the elevator shaft back up to the top. It seemed like a plausible revenge. Make me suffer the same way their fathers had.
I closed my mouth and breathed through my nose—I could sense the dust creeping into my lungs. They were right that even a ghost would need a respirator down here.
That’s when I heard the noise that sounded like Darth Vader.
“Natalie. Natalie…” a light appeared far off in the distance, with some dark figure I couldn’t quite make out creeping toward me. “I am your father…” the voice continued.
My heartbeat raced and I felt disoriented. Was I hallucinating?
The figure moved toward me slowly, seemingly illuminated by a light that seemed to move at the same paces as the figure.
Fight poured through me, and I screamed.
I screamed so loud I felt the earth around me shake. I screamed for Shane to wake up, and my father to come back to life.
For anyone to know I was down here, really.
“Ah, fuck, Jesus, lady!”
The mysterious figure was not so mysterious after all. It was Jared.
With Bob holding a light to him as he walked. They were both walking with headlamps and respirators, and to be fair it looked damn freaky, even now knowing that’s what it was.
“For fuck’s sake man, let’s do what we came here to do,” Bob said.
“You’re such a horny little fuck,” Jared taunted.
My muscles went rigid when I heard that.
Oh fuck.
I panicked. I needed to do something. But my arms and legs were taped down to the chair. I tried rocking, and all I did was manage to tip myself over and land on the dirty earth.
Jared and Bob laughed as they got close to me. Now their voices sounded even more menacing, through the respirators.
They picked me up and examined me, flashing their lights into my eyes like an eye exam.
Jared’s hand struck me across the face.
“You don’t try to get away. Not going to happen any more.”
“Shane! Shane could come down any minute.”
Bob chuckled. “Yeah, and we’d shoot him. But he’d never come down here. As crazy as he is on the ice, he’s scared shitless to come all the way down to this part of the mine. Had a panic attack the last time he came down here, after his dad died. Can’t make it down here without launching himself into an attack like that.”
“So you, my dear, are fucked,” Jared added.
“You’ll never live with yourselves after this! It’s not going to bring your parents back to life, you know!” I shouted at them.
The comment seemed to have no effect on them whatsoever.
It was in their dead, lifeless eyes.
There was nothing behind them.
They’d gone over the edge, and nothing I could say would stop them.
Maybe they weren’t undead ghosts.
But they certainly weren’t fully human anymore either.
28
Shane
I had no idea where I was.
It took me a solid minute to remember who I was.
The thing that reminded me was her scent.
They say smell causes the strongest memory images. Well, thank God for that.
I sat up and realized I was in Jared’s truck, and my head was throbbing like I’d been knocked with the devil’s pitchfork.
Also, my wrists had been duct-taped together, along with my legs. And mouth.
Like a bolt of lightning, the events of the morning came rushing back to me.
Jared and Bob infiltrating my house.
The gun. My charge. The pistol whip. Natalie’s voice before I passed out.
They’d gone over the edge.
Scooting my body toward the door, I managed to push it open.
I tumbled out, falling face first into the snow. Apparently moving when your appendages are taped together is harder than one would think.
Taking a deep breath, I thought about how if they were doing this to me, and weren’t here, God only knew what they’d be doing with Natalie right at this very moment.
“Natalie,” I groaned into the snow, into my taped-shut mouth.
With a heavy heave of my hands, I pulled them toward my body a few times and loosened the tape. Using my body as leverage, I was able to break the tape on my wrists.
I barely felt any pain when I ripped the tape off my mouth, and then worked on my legs until they came off too.
Fucking dumbasses. Did they really think taping me would stop me? Probably thought I was knocked out for longer.
I tried to stand, but my first step was so wobbly I ended up right back in the snow. The freezing cold actually felt good on my head wound. The way it was throbbing I needed to get this checked out ASAP.
I stood up, and when I saw the signage, my heart started to race.
TOFT COAL MINE
I felt weakness in my legs, and started to shake.
Now was not the time to be weak.
I didn’t even have shoes on, just my moccasins that I’d been wearing when they made it inside the house. I wasn’t shaking from the cold, though.
I was shaking because of where I was.
Now it made sense. Jared and Bob brought her here to fuck with me as much as her.
I couldn’t go down into the mine. On the ice, I ruled over the two of them. They’d always been a little jealous of my hockey talents.
So when I had a panic attack the first time we came down to party in the closed up mine, they reveled in the fact that they had a one up on me.
They could have just left me back at home. Bringing me here was a way of taunting me, of daring me to come down into the mine.
My stomach churned with anxiety. I let the cold air whip into my face. Fuck it. The pain was enjoyable for me in this moment.
I started heading to the old entrance of the mine, trudging through the snow and following their footprints.
Maybe they didn’t realize how much I’d come around to Team Natalie in these past few days.
She wasn’t perfect, no. But who was? I couldn’t explain why I felt such a strong connection to her. In a lot of ways it made no sense. I hadn’t known her all that well even when she and Louisa used to hang out together. And I’d hated her for many years.
Being with her in person was like she had been placed in front of me to help with a transformation I was in dire need of.
Before she arrived, I’d been on the cusp of it, but I needed her to push me over the edge.
Maybe we weren’t ‘true’ storybook love. Who knew what love was, anyway? It felt like we were just picking up as lovers from a past life, though.
After the seemingly senseless tragedies of my life, I’d drifted far away from any sort of belief in higher powers.
To put her through…whatever they were currently putting her through would be on my watch.
I picked up my pace. Fuck. Every moment lost now was a second something very bad could be happening to her in the mine shaft.
My anxiety about heading into the same dark, claustrophobic space where my father had died didn’t disappear.
My breaths went shallow and I had to force them to be deep as I grabbed the flare gun and headed down the mine shaft.
Holy shit, I noticed an old box labeled TNT not far from the entrance of the mine.
Were they really that careless with their explosives here?
Bruce Toft really didn’t give a crap after things went south in the mine.
I stuffed two red sticks of dynamite in my pocket, and grabbed a shovel I saw laying on the ground. It would have to do for a weapon. Then headed for one of the elevator shafts.
As I descended into the depths, my eyes might as well have b
een closed, it was so dark.
But I remembered words my dad had told me before he perished, when he used to take me down here with him.
“Funny thing is, son, it’s dark but you don’t even need to be able to see. You can learn to just do everything by feel.”
My skin crawled as I wondered just what I’d have to do down here. How far I would go.
The famous quote flashed through my mind:
You can’t drive out darkness with darkness, only light can do that.
Well, I thought. The only light I have comes in the form of this flare gun.
My heart palpitated and I tried not to think too hard about how I’d have to drive out the evil below.
I was partially to blame, though. I’d let Jared and Bob’s plan fester like an untreated disease.
Now, it was time for retribution.
29
Natalie
“You are a very pretty girl. Papa Toft sure knew how to pick ‘em.”
Jared ran his finger down my cheek, and I prepared for the worst.
“Fuck you,” I spat out. I was done playing nice. What the fuck did he even mean by that, anyway? My dad didn’t pick me as his daughter.
“That’s good. I like that fire.”
Bob held the gun and the light on me.
“You’re just going to stand there and watch while he does what he’s going to do?” I gritted out toward Bob, who shrugged.
“He goes first.”
“Yeah. Jared always seems to go first. It’s clear who the alpha between the two of you is.”
“Now look here, you stupid little bitch,” Jared said, holding my jaw. “We did rock paper scissors for this. That’s how unimportant you are to us. Stop trying to play your silly little mind games with us. They won’t work.”
“No they won’t,” Bob echoed.
“Such cowards, both of you. Well yeah, go ahead. Get your retribution. Fucking take it. But the ghosts are watching, you know.”
They both bust into laughter.
“Ghosts? There’s no ghosts. We just made that up to mess with you,” Jared said, running a hand up and down my taped body. Using a knife, he cut the tape that was keeping my leg attached to the leg of the chair and impeding my mobility.
Black Ice: A Standalone Enemies to Lovers Romance Page 20
