LIKED - A Dark Romance Novel (Story of Dangerous Obsession and Lust) (11 page)

Justin lifted the phone in his hand and held it out to Gia. She stared
for a second and then snatched it away from him. “We have to get out of here.”

“She’s crazier than I thought. No one will get here in time.”

Gia thumbed the buttons and the phone came up with a keypad and the
message: Sorry. Try Again.

“Oh, God,” Gia said, “What’s her code?”

“She uses her fingerprint,” Justin said. “I was hoping it was already
unlocked.”

“It would have a four digit code too. They all do. What is hers?”

Justin shook his head. “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.”

“What numbers mean something to her?” Gia asked. “Addresses? Birthdays?
What? What does she care about?”

Justin swallowed and shook his head. “She’s obsessed with you. Your
movies. Facts about you. Ever since … the accident.”

Gia licked her lips. She typed in the year her mother died: Sorry. Try
Again.

Gia stared up at the ceiling. She typed in the date and the year in two
different combinations: Sorry. Try Again … Sorry. Try Again.

She heard the door to the van slam outside. Gia felt a wave of panic wash
through her. There was no time for anyone to save her. Susan was going to kill
Gia and maybe Justin too.

Justin said, “There’s a gun in the clown.”

“What?” Gia stared at the number pad on the phone.

“There’s a gun in the clown cookie jar,” he said. “I hid it there. Susan
doesn’t know I have it.”

“Why did you bring it?” Gia asked. “For me?”

Justin shook his head. “No. I don’t know. Susan told me to bring it just
in case. I did, but then told her I forgot it. I shouldn’t have done anything
she said, but she told me it was all part of the game.”

“Did this feel like a game?” Gia shook her head.

“After what we did in your apartment?” Justin shook his head. “I don’t
know. Susan has me all messed up. She’s one year younger than me, but she’s
always been in charge.”

Gia stared at the phone. She typed in her own birth date, May 5
^th
and then the year. The keys faded out and the icons popped up.

Gia hit the green phone button and tapped in 911.

It was ringing.

Gia heard a slide guitar that reminded her of nights sneaking into the
bar across the bridge. She heard an engine rev.

“Nine-One-One. What is your emergency?”

Gia opened her mouth and took a breath, but then the wall to her right
exploded inward. Wood paneling peeled away, split and folded under the front
wheels of the van. Plaster, splintered two-by-four boards, and sections of
corroded pipe blasted out into the air. Some of it soared within inches of her
face. Something hard slammed across her knuckles bringing up blood on each one
and knocking the phone away spinning in the air with the cone of debris. White
fissures erupted across the windshield in deep cracks. Water sprayed out across
the side of the van and rained down into the room.

The van kept coming and swerved toward her. Gia watched the grill bounce
as it approached. The corner of the bumper struck the refrigerator and peeled
it open like a smashed fruit as it jammed the dead appliance back into the
wall. Cracks spider webbed out from the point of impact all the way across in
both directions.

The van bounced off changing direction, just missing Gia, and
obliterating the counter from the end. Cleaning supplies toppled out as the
cabinets on that side blew apart and the clown jar fell off the back and
shattered behind what remained of the counter.

The van stopped and glass dumped out onto the concrete in shards from
both headlight covers. Something dark and thick leaked out in globs from under
the engine.

Thank God for concrete floors in the clown house, Gia thought.

The radio inside the van clicked off in the middle of the guitar solo.

Gia looked over past the sink at the opposite counter where Susan had
been sitting before the violence was unleashed. The toaster tipped over and
fell into the space for the main room. The tiny key was spinning on its tip
like a top, but then came to rest at the edge of the counter without falling.

Gia felt her heart drop.

The engine of the van sputtered, but then continued running. Something
was hammering like a sledge inside the engine every tenth or fifteenth cycle.
It vibrated the entire building.

The key danced on the edge of the counter, but still did not fall.

Gia spit out dirt flavored water from wash that was blasting against the
ceiling and dripping down onto her hair and face. It still tasted better than
the flavor of fear and stomach acid already in her mouth.

Chips of plaster and moist powder fell around her from the wall behind
them with each rough vibration.

She waited for the van to back up and have another go at her where she
was chained in place. Instead, the driver’s door opened wide with a creak and
hit the breakfast table. The table finally tipped dumping the plates and
glasses along the wet concrete.

Susan slid out of the van in her soaked, blue pajamas with one shoe and
one muddy, bare foot. She hoisted a silver tire iron curved like a giant candy
cane. “Where’s my phone?”

“You dropped it,” Gia said.

Susan lifted the iron above her head with the hooked end nearly touching
the ceiling. She stalked forward towards Gia.

Gia tried to pull away out of fear. The cuff jerked against the radiator
and Gia felt the pipes shift.

Justin stood up on his end bent over by his bound arm and shouted. “Leave
her alone, Susan. Stop it.”

The radiator shifted again.

Gia spun around and planted both feet against the cracked wall beside the
radiator. She locked her free hand over the bracelet of the cuff over her wrist
and pulled with all her might. The pipes pulled out from the wall, but only
revealed more discolored sections of pipe.

Susan swung down at Gia’s head. Gia twisted sideways. Justin lunged and
shoved against Susan’s hip pushing her sideways. Her aim went off hitting the
wall and rang off the metal of the radiator as she staggered. Chunks of wall
fell to concrete and broke apart.

“Stop it, Susan,” Justin yelled. “You’re crazy. You are fucking crazy.”

“Stop me, Justin,” Susan said.

She brought the tire iron back over her shoulder like a baseball bat.

Gia pushed her feet against the side of the radiator and pulled sideways.
The skin on her hand bunched up and went pale. The discolored pipe on the other
end of the cuff bent and pinched, but would not break.

Susan swung and Gia braced herself for her lights to go out even as she
kept pulling.

Justin ducked and the tire iron hit the wall above his head knocking a
hole through it.

“You don’t love me, Justin,” Susan said. “You didn’t save me; I had to
save myself. You don’t love her; only I love her. You couldn’t save me and you
can’t save her.”

Susan lifted the tire iron above her head with both hands over her
brother. “Go on and stop me, Justin, stop me.”

The radiator held as Gia continued to pull, but her hand popped out of
the bracelet and she propelled herself back from the radiator a couple feet
along the wet floor.

Susan turned and looked down at Gia with the iron still raised. “Justin,
can you do anything right? Tighten the cuffs.”

Gia stared at her hands like she couldn’t believe she had gotten them
free. She hadn’t even considered trying to slip her hand out.

Susan took a step toward her.

Gia rolled over to her stomach and scrambled away in the direction of the
van.

“Stop trying to hurt her,” Justin said.

Susan took another step. “Make me, Justin. Make me stop.”

Justin lashed out and drove his knife into the back of Susan’s calf and
she screamed.

***

Put It Down

Susan staggered and whipped around with the iron in her hand. Even with
the water spray against the ceiling and raining down, the blood ran out thick
from the wound. Susan’s eyes were wide and her jaw hung open like it was
unhinged.

“You fucking stabbed me! You chose her over me,” Susan said the words
like they were some form of curse.

Gia wasn’t sure if the curse was on Susan or cast toward Justin.

Justin held the knife up between himself and his sister. “Put it down and
give up, Susan. This is over.”

“Make me,” Susan said.

Gia continued to scoot back toward the side of the van.

Justin lunged out toward Susan. His target was not clear from his aim. It
could have been toward one of her arms. Susan swung and caught Justin across
the knuckles of his knife hand. He cried out as he pulled his hand back to his
chest and the knife twirled away in the air skidding across the main room floor
under the couch.

She came back on the back hand swing toward her brother’s head. He
brought the palm up beside his head absorbing the impact and catching the shaft
of the iron. He tried to pull it away from her, but his knuckles still throbbed
from the strike and he couldn’t lever it away from her with one hand.

Susan charged and slammed her elbow and forearm into his head pinning him
to the wall. He brought his knee up into her stomach and she pressed the bar of
the tire iron into Justin’s throat. He tried to twist it away from her again.

Susan pulled backward ripping the weapon free of his grasp. As her weight
came down on her injured calf, she lost her balance and collapsed backward
crashing through the top of the tipped kitchen table.

Justin reached out to the end of his cuff and tried to grab her, but she
was out of reach.

Gia reached the van and crawled up the running board to get inside the
open driver’s side.

Susan climbed out of the broken table still holding the tire iron. She
looked back and forth between Gia and Justin. “If you love her more, then I’ll
take her from you, you traitor coward.”

Susan lunged toward the van and nearly fell as she limped on her bad leg.
She gritted her teeth and continued toward Gia.

“No. Stop. Please,” Justin yelled out.

Gia tried to scramble into the van for safety, but her feet slipped on
the wet running board and she fell to the slippery concrete floor on her knees.
Susan lifted the iron. Gia dropped to her side in the bits of debris and rolled
underneath the van. Susan swung grazing the running board and ringing the metal
off the floor, but Gia was already under the van.

Gia belly crawled over the painful bits of grit under the van as Susan
swung the iron to and fro under the van. She connected with Gia’s legs, but not
hard enough to do any damage.

Gia came up on the other side and pulled at the handle of the passenger’s
side door shaking the whole van. It was locked.

She heard Susan’s one shoe scraping and splashing on the other side of
the van. She’s coming around for me, Gia thought.

Gia turned and saw the break in the wall of the kitchen. She saw grass,
muddy tracks, and woods. She considered running outside barefoot, soaking wet,
and lost.

She looked down and saw the broken face of the clown and she thought
about what Justin had said about the gun. Gia went down to her knees and swiped
her hands through the broken pieces of the cookie jar. The sharp edges cut her
hands and tiny shards stabbed into her knees.

She found the textured grip of the handgun and brought it up out of the
broken ceramics. She felt the side and thumbed off the safety like she had been
taught in the weapons training back on the set of
Blazin’ Babes of the Weird
West
. She had only ever fired blanks on the set and live rounds on the
practice range during prep when they tried to get the babes to keep their eyes
open when they fired. She hadn’t picked up a real gun since.

She looked up in time to see Susan standing above her. She had on bare
foot on the hood of the van and one sneaker on the remains of the counter. Her
pajama bottoms were sagging low on her hips from being soaking wet. With only
one eye open she looked like some sort of monster or crazy, mutant pirate. Her
calf dripped blood onto the floor.

Susan raised the tire iron over her head.

Gia brought the gun up without really aiming and fired wild. The report
was deafening and she realized that she had never fired a gun without ear
protection and it hurt. Her elbows were bent like they had taught her not to do
and the gun jumped back striking her collar bone with a wave of dizzying pain.
She barely managed to hold onto the gun as her ears rang.

The bullet sparked off the hook of the iron and shattered the overhead
fixture raining glass down and darkening the kitchen into daytime shadows.

Susan staggered backward in surprise and fell off backward.

Gia squared her shoulders and stood. She aimed the gun down at the floor
in both hands and rounded the back of the van. She watched her step since she
was barefoot. She stayed close to the wall as she emerged from the back of the
van.

Susan charged and Gia fired shattering the window over the kitchen sink.
The pines continued to sway outside with no regard for the violence unfolding
within. Susan fumbled the tire iron and it fell to the concrete with a clatter.
She lurched sideways and past her brother chained to the radiator in wide-eyed
shock. It only passed through Gia’s mind as a fleeting thought that he might
have mixed emotions about the crazy sister he had fled to California with, who
had cuffed him to a radiator, who had beaten him, who he had stabbed, and who
Gia now aimed at as she hobbled across the floor of the group home.

Gia centered herself and braced her free hand under her gun hand the way
she had been taught. She tried to remember the steps she had been shown that
included her breathing, but aiming at a living, bleeding person’s back, she
could not remember if she was supposed to breathe through the trigger pull or
hold her breath. Both seemed wrong to her. This was different in every
conceivable way from the conditions on the set and on the firing range. If Gia
had gone through this ordeal first, her movies and performances would have been
much better and more realistic over the years.

The gun wavered in her hands and she shook at her wrists and locked
elbows. She didn’t know if the unsteadiness came from fear, adrenaline, the
physical toll of the fight, or the days of being taped or chained. The parts of
her body alternated from hurting to being numb up and down the length of her
frame and limbs.

Water dripped in her eyes from the broken pipes in the open wall spraying
the ceiling above her.

As Susan ran and hopped stutter-stepping past the couch, Gia brought her
finger closed on the trigger again. The sound hurt her ears that were already
ringing to the point of deafness. The pain of it traveled from both sides into
the center of her head and throbbed back out against the inside of her skull.
She almost wanted to let Susan go just so she wouldn’t have to endure another
gunshot. The entire world was muffled and the only way Gia knew that any sound
still existed at all was the dampened sound of water peppering the metal roof
of the van behind her. The note of those pops was low enough in register to get
through the dead range of her hearing. In that closed range of sound, she
vaguely thought how high the ceilings in the group home were that a van had fit
inside without scraping the ceiling.

The moment the shot fired the recoil racked through her body. Even with
her joints braced properly, her whole body jolted. The back of the couch exploded
out of the sheets with stuffing.

Susan staggered and appeared to be going down as she stumbled forward on
a bloody leg that didn’t seem to want to support her. As Susan regained her
footing and bobbled onward, Gia realized that even if her previous bullet had
passed all the way through the sofa, it seemed to have missed Susan.

Gia sighed and took aim again. Susan seemed to be staggering toward the
wall like she was seeking help from the balloon bearing clown or wanted to
project herself through the surface into the world of the lion and giraffe
friends.

Gia felt a pang in her chest and had a moment of odd, almost psychic
connection to Susan. Gia felt a twinge of sympathetic charity toward Susan
which harkened back to their trips in Susan’s Prius when Gia felt no other real
connections to anyone in the world. She felt emotions that dated back to the
time before Gia knew that Susan had orchestrated the accident that killed Gia’s
mother and before she knew Don’s body was hidden in the small storage section
where it probably still festered in the LA heat. Gia projected back to a time
before she knew Susan, when Susan was a girl trapped in a functioning group
home at the mercy of the desires of a monster named Old Pastor Jack. Gia saw a
younger, still skinny Susan Simms curled up on a couch without the sheets and
bullet holes, maybe next to her brother Justin who felt helpless to do anything
to protect her, and she stared at the animals and clowns on that strange wall.
Where the other kids talked about how creepy the scenes were, Susan wanted to
escape the three dimensional world of dead parents and monster pastors. She
wanted to enter the flat walled world of globbed paint colors, dead faced
clowns, and off kilter jungle animals. The real world was the awful, painful
place. The funhouse paintings of horror were a place that was safe. Maybe Susan
watched Gia’s movies in the dark in growing obsession. feeling the same desire
to escape into Gia’s flat horror world on the screen. She felt connected to Gia
through dead, drunk mothers and monsters named Jack.

Susan was going for one of the open doorways. Gia took aim again, but
Susan flung the door closed and Gia was aiming at the flat wood. She could fire
a shot through the hollow door and probably tear it apart like paper. She
wanted to, but Gia had lost count of bullets and did not want to waste one. She
was afraid to take her aim off the door and have Susan come back at her again
like a creature from one of her slasher films.

As she waited the ringing in her ears went from a constant, deafening hum
to a pulsing warble with real world sound breaking through between the crests
in the pulses of her hearing.

It was in one of those moments of hearing between the deaf pulses that
she heard glass shatter behind the door. At first she pictured Susan breaking a
vase or bottle to come out fighting with the jagged edge. Then, she realized it
was a window. Susan was escaping the house. She might flee, but she might also
come around for another attack on Gia and the brother she saw as a traitor.
There was no telling what nightmare weapons she might find out there before she
came back. Gia pictured the whirling blades of a thresher crashing into the
house next.

***