JACK KILBORN ~ AFRAID (16 page)

Jessie Lee heard a loud
SNAP
accompanied by blinding pain—

She had stuck her fingers in a mouse trap.

Without being able to stop it, she screamed. And as the sound left her lips, Jessie Lee Sloan realized she was as good as dead.

F
ran watched, impotent, as Josh fired twice more at the door between her and her son. The bullets pinged off without even making a dent in the steel.

The smoke had gotten so thick that every breath provoked coughing. The door was too hot to touch, and the temperature around them had risen to the point where the air shimmered at their feet. It seemed as if every bit of moisture in Fran’s body had been baked away. But she still picked up the sledgehammer, still pushed Josh aside, and still swung at the doorknob with everything she had.

The door didn’t open.

Josh said something to her, but she couldn’t understand him above the roar of the flames surrounding them. He pried the sledge out of her grasp, eased her back, and swung it. But not at the door; Josh aimed for the door frame, next to the deadbolt.

The wood gave, and the head of the sledgehammer made a chip in the wall. Josh repeated the process. Fran had to get down on her knees to breathe—the last of the good air formed a pocket below waist level. Josh continued to stand, continued to hammer. Fran kept her eyes glued to the doorjamb, saw it splinter away, and then the dull thud of striking wood was replaced by the clang of metal on metal.

Josh fell to his knees next to her, coughing.

“… forced,” he croaked.

“What?”

“The doorway … it’s reinforced. We can’t get in this way.”

Movement, behind them. Erwin knelt next to Fran, put a hand on her shoulder.

“We have to get out of here! The structure is giving out!”

“I’m not leaving my son!”

Erwin and Josh exchanged a glance. Then they each grabbed an arm and dragged Fran out of the house.

Fran kicked. She screamed. She locked her mouth onto Josh’s arm and bit him. But they manhandled her out the front door and onto the lawn, through puddles of raw sewage. Fran felt like she was made of glass and about to shatter.

“DUNCAN!” She continued to fight, but they wouldn’t let her go. “Please! I have to get—”

And that’s when the house collapsed.

S
weat soaked Duncan’s hair and ran down his face. The oversized T-shirt stuck to him like he’d worn it swimming. He’d never been this hot before. Hot and thirsty. His tongue felt really big.

“I want something to drink,” he said to Mrs. Teller.

“I’m sorry, Duncan. I don’t think there’s anything left.”

Two of the four walls of shelves were burning, along with the supplies on the shelves. The brightness of the flames could be seen through the thick smoke, which had almost filled the room.

Duncan coughed, patted Woof on the head.

“It’s going to be okay, boy,” he said.

But Duncan knew it wasn’t going to be okay. The stairs were on fire. Mom and Josh probably couldn’t get to them. He still hoped that they would. Maybe Josh had a fireproof suit. Maybe he had a fire truck with a big hose that would put out the flames really fast.

Duncan wiped his face. The heat was so bad that it was starting to hurt his skin, like sunburn. His head felt funny, too, like he just woke up and was still groggy.

“We’re not going to burn,” Mrs. Teller said.

Duncan looked at her, squinting through his red-rimmed eyes. Did she know how to escape? He recalled Bernie’s lecture, about how bad it hurt to get burned. He didn’t want to burn to death. He didn’t want to get burned at all, not even a little bit.

“Terrible way to go,” Mrs. Teller said. “Terrible way. Burning in a fire.”

She had her eyes closed. Duncan didn’t think she was talking to him.

“It will be okay,” she said. “It will be okay. I can do this. We won’t burn. The Lord is my shepherd and He’ll give me the strength.”

Duncan coughed, then asked, “Strength for what?”

Mrs. Teller stared at Duncan. She was sobbing, so bad it shook her whole body.

“I won’t let you suffer like that, child. I won’t let you burn to death. I promise.”

Duncan didn’t like seeing Mrs. Teller like this. She was an adult. She was supposed to be strong. It made him even more scared.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“When the time comes, I’ll be strong,” Mrs. Teller answered. “I’ll take care of us both.”

Then she racked her shotgun.

D
r. Stubin combed through the wreckage site, looking for something that might help him. The three soldiers who’d been babysitting him were mostly intact, though the explosion had thrown one of them almost fifty yards from where Stubin had last seen him. Another, the sergeant, had actually lived long enough to ask Stubin for help. He died less than a minute later.

The Green Berets had fared even worse. Stubin had found bits and pieces of them, but nothing larger than an arm.

The Huey they’d arrived in no longer resembled anything other than junk. It, and the previous wreck, and been reduced to smoking scrap iron and burning bits of rubber and plastic. The whole area looked like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

Stubin knew General Tope wasn’t foolish. He’d counter the loss of his team with firepower, and a lot of it. It was only a question of waiting and the cavalry would come.

The problem was Mathison. After the explosion, he’d fled into the forest. Stubin had called to him, and whistled for him, but the monkey was apparently too spooked to come back. And Mathison was important to Stubin. Very important.

Stubin wasn’t sure how much monkey instinct Mathison retained after all of the brain tinkering he’d undergone, but the doctor doubted his capuchin friend could survive in the wild on his own. He’d seek out humans. And it might be the wrong group of humans. Stubin had to find him. But first, he had to salvage what he could from the wreck.

Stubin walked to the epicenter of the disaster, then began a 360-degree spiral outward, watching where he stepped, eyes peeled for anything useful. A radio would be nice.

After five minutes, he hadn’t found anything except some broken night-vision goggles and a boot containing three-quarters of a foot. Hadn’t they been carrying supplies? Food? Guns? Didn’t they know the danger they were facing?

Apparently not, any more than they expected to be blown up.

Moving to the perimeter of the crash site, Stubin poked at a smoking bush with a stick and pried away something that looked like a shotgun, but with a much bigger barrel. It appeared unscathed. He touched it quickly, ascertained it was cool enough to hold, and picked it up. Stubin took a few seconds to locate the lock on the breech, and the barrel swiveled down, revealing a grenade—probably nonlethal if they were following instructions. He pulled the large canister out, judged it in working condition, and let it drop back in.

The grenade launcher had a sling, and Stubin wrapped it around his shoulder and continued hunting. He found two MRE rations, considered leaving them, but realized he didn’t know how long he’d be in the woods. They went into his jacket, along with some compact binoculars with one cracked lens. The binocs also had a compass on the top, and amazingly it still worked.

Stubin found north, tried to picture the map of the area he’d seen briefly while riding in the chopper, and deduced he was east of town. He whistled again for Mathison, got no response, and then headed west, toward Safe Haven.

T
he instant Taylor looked up, Jessie Lee scrambled forward. Her knees banged into the joists, and the mousetrap still pinched her fingers, but she moved as fast as possible while still maintaining her balance. After getting two body lengths away from where she’d been, Jessie Lee held her breath and tried to listen, straining to hear anything other than the hammering of her heart.

She heard nothing.

He won’t shoot me,
she thought.
Too loud.
He wouldn’t want to arouse the suspicions of the mob in the gym. Besides, Taylor hadn’t been holding a gun. He
did
have a stun gun, and Jessie Lee was a cornered target. She had to get out of there, fast.

Noise, directly beneath her. The unmistakable clang of a metal locker opening.

She gingerly pulled off the mousetrap and tried to move forward, but there wasn’t anyplace further to go—she hit the wall. Turning around while balancing on one-inch sections of board would take more time than she had. She could hear Taylor climbing up the locker, and any second he’d be pushing up a ceiling tile, reaching out with the stun gun.

Jessie Lee chose to move backward. She couldn’t see behind her in the dark, but the joists were spaced evenly apart and she could sense where they were. Fast as she dared she began to crab backward, heading for the girls’ locker room.

Ahead of her light surged in from where a ceiling tile used to be. She squinted at Taylor, less than three feet away, poking his head through. Could he see her in the dark?

Apparently he could. The killer stared directly at her and offered one of his cold smiles.

“I like the feisty ones. Maura Talbott was feisty. She was my sixth girl, in Madison. I tied her down with baling wire and bit off all of her fingers.”

Jessie Lee remembered the TV special, which showed the autopsy photos after the obligatory
parental discretion advised
warning. The victim’s fingers weren’t all he’d chewed off.

She moved even faster, feet missing the boards and sometimes slipping between them and hitting ceiling tile. She banged her elbow—the same one—and then the thick gold Omega anklet that Erwin bought her became caught on something. One of the wires, holding up the tiles. She tried to pull free, without success. It held her like a claw.

Ahead of her, Taylor crawled up onto the joists. He still had the smile on, and he pressed the button on the stun gun to show her what was in store. A burst of white light crackled across the two probes.

Jessie Lee pushed with her free foot. No good. She crawled back, bending the knee of her trapped leg as she got closer, and then her handhold slipped and her butt fell directly between two boards, breaking through the ceiling tile. Her upper body followed.

She cried out, hands grasping at the air, and for a crazy moment Jessie Lee was free falling to the floor of the boys’ locker room, headfirst. But her leg stayed stuck. So instead of falling through, she hung there by her knees, upside down like a child on a jungle gym.

She swung back and forth, the bright lights in the room and the blood rushing to her head adding to her disorientation. It took a moment for the world to stop spinning, for things to come back into focus. When they did, she freaked out.

Bodies. Dead bodies. Stacked ten high, like cordwood, in the showers directly beneath her. At least fifty people. Neighbors. Friends. Jesus—her cousin Rachel. Seamus Dailey. Mary Porter. John Kramer. Sarah Richardson, the head teller from the town bank.

A sob tore loose from Jessie Lee’s throat. On top of the pile, close enough to reach out and touch, was her best friend and maid of honor, Mandy Sprinkle.

Blood coated every inch of the showers like paint, so thick Jessie Lee could taste copper. It brought back a long-ago trip to a turkey-rendering plant, to placate a boyfriend who worked there. The blood inside the slaughterhouse flowed knee deep—a swirling river filled with bits of tissue and swarming with flies.

Creaking, above. Taylor.

Jessie Lee tried to pull herself up, to free her leg, but she couldn’t get any handholds through the hole she made. She reached ahead of her, sticking her fingers around a square of ceiling tile, and it tore away without supporting her weight.

She lifted her other leg—the one that wasn’t caught—but that put too much weight on her trapped knee, causing instant pain.

The creaking got closer and all she could do was hang there, like a piñata waiting for the stick. She tried to scream, but her breath came in shallow pants and all she managed were squeaks.

Control yourself,
she thought.
Stop panicking. If you scream, you can save yourself. Someone in the gym will come and investigate. Just fill your lungs with air.

She tried. She tried harder than anything she’d ever attempted in her twenty-eight years of life. But every time she sucked in a bit of air she saw someone else in the mound of death, someone else she recognized, and the oxygen whooshed out of her.

If she couldn’t pull herself up, and couldn’t scream, there was one more possibility for escape.

Not wanting to, but not having any choice, Jessie Lee reached out for her best friend, Mandy, atop the pile. She didn’t look at her friend’s face, frozen in wild-eyed terror. She didn’t look at her throat, which had a cut so deep you could see inside of it. Jessie Lee concentrated on Mandy’s hand. The same hand she held when they spied on the boys taking showers so long ago, giggling madly.

Mandy’s fingers splayed out, as if expecting to be given something. Jessie Lee stretched, but she was inches away from touching them. She tried to swing by her knees, remembering the school-yard trick known as the penny drop. The first pass, she barely touched Mandy’s finger. The second time, she grasped her hand but couldn’t hold on.

Third time was the charm. Jessie Lee entangled her fingers in Mandy’s, then she brought her other hand around and locked on to her friend’s wrist.

Dear God, she’s still warm.

Jessie Lee reflexively let go, panicked to the point of hysterics. This couldn’t be happening. Less than an hour ago she’d been planning her wedding, thinking about the extra things she could do with the lottery money. And now she hung upside down over a stack of her dead friends and neighbors while a psycho tried to kill her.

She made fists and pounded her thighs several times, trying to focus, trying to force courage. Then she began to rock back and forth again. This time when she caught Mandy’s hand she held on and pulled. She pulled for all she was worth.

But instead of freeing herself, all Jessie Lee did was drag Mandy off of her roost. Her friend slid across the corpse beneath her and then headed face-first down the pile. Jessie Lee tried to hold on, but the strain on her knees became too great, and then Mandy tumbled to the floor. She landed in the pool of blood, arms and legs akimbo, her eyes staring up at Jessie Lee accusingly.