LIKED - A Dark Romance Novel (Story of Dangerous Obsession and Lust) (12 page)

Justin called through the ring in her ears and said, “Uncuff me, Gia. We
need to go.”

The engine in the van gave two sledge hammer bangs before going back to
its uneven rattle. Whatever was coming apart in there was progressing.

Gia lowered the gun and she stepped to the counter to grab up the
handcuff key that refused to fall. As she closed her fingers around it, she
felt a dozen wasp stings on the bottoms of her bare feet. She staggered back
and looked down to see the broken glass all over the floor.

Gia sat down next to the broken table and forced out the larger shards
with weakening pain. She still felt smaller white slivers under her skin, but
she could not get to them.

“Let’s go, please,” Justin said.

Gia retook her feet adding the pain of slivers of glass in her feet to
every other ache and injury she felt. She turned and limped over towards
Justin. He knelt and slid his right wrist in the cuff up the pipe and turned it
over so she could reach the lock.

Gia stopped with the key in one hand and Justin’s gun from the clown
cookie jar in the other. He looked from the cuff up into her face. His dark
hair was limp, flat, and pasted around his face from the wash of water off the
ceiling.

She thought about the forced shower after she was dragged into the
building with a bag over her head. They were Susan’s words and plan, but Justin
had delivered them playing the part of Jack the Liker. She thought about the
water in the van and that awful chicken salad with the raisins. Susan probably
fed him the lines before he played out the scene, but Justin had delivered them
and gave her no safe word for the awful game. She sat in her own piss and he
put the tape over her mouth and she was given no choice in the matter. That was
the difference between a game and real torture. Susan might be worse and she
might have bent Justin’s mind to serve her own dark purposes, but that did not
change his part in that service.

Something shifted on Justin’s face. Gia couldn’t read it. It wasn’t fear.
She had seen that in him when Susan turned on him. It wasn’t exactly regret.
She had seen that when he tried to back out of the game in her apartment.
Looking back, she realized she had seen it come through his face as he still
played Jack before Susan hit him with the phone.

This was a different emotion. Gia thought maybe she was seeing realization
in his eyes. Did he know what she was thinking?

Gia lifted the gun and aimed it down at Justin’s head. He flinched and
blinked several times like he thought the shot might come at any instant. He
looked down and took a few deep breaths that lifted and dropped her shoulders.

Finally, he looked up at her again past the gun. She expected him to beg
for his life or plead his case. He had tried to help her. He had fought Susan
on Gia’s behalf and had even stabbed his sister for Gia. He had grabbed up the
phone for Gia to try to call for help. He had been surprised when he found out
Susan’s version of the story wasn’t true. Gia was ready to hear all those
arguments because they were true. If she was going to shoot him for what he had
done wrong to her, she supposed it was only fair for him to have a chance to
babble out what he had done right.

A look of calm settled into his face instead of any form of survival
instinct or desperation. His eyes watered in a way that had nothing to do with
the drip from the ceiling. He nodded at her and his mouth settled into a tight
line.

“Justin?” The word left her mouth in a whisper as she kept the gun
trained on his head. Her hands weren’t shaking anymore and where she had missed
the sister in the heat of pitched battle from a distance, she was steady as she
aimed down on the brother at point blank range.

***

Because She Won’t Stop

“I understand why you have to do it,” Justin said. His voice held steady
like he was stating that he was accepting a traffic ticket. It was on the next
set of sentences that his voice wavered and his chin crinkled between phrases
as he spoke. “I should have known better. She was always messed up and that was
my fault too for not protecting her. After mom and dad died, protecting her was
my only job and I failed at it. I knew she was obsessed with you, but I didn’t
help her; I didn’t stop her. I just did what she said. I should have protected
you from her, but I didn’t. She said it was your fault we were here, but that’s
a lie. It’s my fault. All of it from the moment I left it to her to solve the
problem with Pastor Jack and we ran away has been my fault.”

Gia swallowed. Her finger was inside the trigger guard and the gun felt
heavy. It felt so heavy that she thought the weight of it might rest it down
against the curve of her finger and the weapon would fire itself.

Would that be the weapon’s fault and not hers? Gia wondered. She put her
finger against the trigger and aimed the weapon at the target, but someone else
had loaded the bullets. She would have just waited and it was gravity that would
have finished the job.

Was that any different than what Susan had done with Justin? Susan had
prepped him and aimed him, so could Gia blame gravity for what fired him along
this path. Once he saw the truth, he had fought for Gia, after all. Susan had
cut the brake line to kill her monster and did not consider Gia’s mother in the
path. Was that the kind of thing an abused girl could consider? If Gia fired
the gun, gravity would not hold the guilt even if a court found her not guilty
due to fighting to free herself from the kidnapping. Susan had used guilt over
Justin’s failure to protect her to bring him into her dark games for as long as
she had. Gia had played those games too.

“Justin, I …”

He nodded again and blinked at the tears spilling over his cheeks. “Do
what you have to do, Gia. Be sure to save one for Susan so you can be free of
her. It’s the only way you can be free because she won’t stop any other way.”

Gia held out the key pinched between her fingers. At first she was
holding out the handcuff key and still aiming the gun at him. Justin looked
back and forth between the gun and the key.

Gia lowered the gun. “Hurry up before she comes back.

Justin took the key from her and fiddled with it in the lock on the
bracelet around his wrist. He breathed out without looking up. “Thank you.”

“If we get out of this,” Gia said, “you get to be the one tied up in any
games we play from now on.”

Justin shook his head still looking down at the cuff. “Thanks for the
invite, but if I get out of this alive, I’m probably going to jail.”

“Justin …”

The cuff popped open and he shoved the key in his pocket as he stood.
“Let’s focus on getting away alive first. Can you walk? It’s a pretty long road
down the hill and then Dark Orchard is a ways after that.”

Gia shifted her weight from foot to foot. She felt the sting of the
glass. She thought about the pastor’s car weaving down and refusing to stop as
he plowed through Gia’s mother. She shivered as much from the thought of it as
from the cold from the water and the pain from her injuries.

“I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”

Justin looked at the van. “The engine is still running. We can try it.
I’ll carry you down on my back, if I have to.”

He started to step away, but Gia grabbed hold of the front of his shirt.
He turned to face her and she leaned in and kissed him on the lips. His mouth
was cold. She started to pull away, but then he leaned toward her and his lips
parted. Their tongues explored their lips and teeth before they separated.

“This is so messed up,” he said. “You were aiming a gun at my head just a
few seconds ago and then … everything else that’s happened.”

She nodded and managed a smile despite everything. “Yeah, anyone that cares
about me would be quite clear that you are bad for me. This is not the way you
start anything resembling a relationship. At the moment, you are the only one
here fighting for me, so wrong or not, each other is all we’ve got.”

He nodded again. “I won’t let you down this time. Have the gun ready just
in case.”

“Okay.” She thumbed the safety back locked.

He turned and took a step toward the van and she followed. He stopped and
turned back around and she blinked staring up at him.

He cleared his throat and said, “For my … Susan. I mean to keep it ready
just in case we need it because of her. Not to shoot me, I mean. That’s what I
meant about having the gun ready.”

Gia nodded. “Yeah, I understand.”

Justin turned back toward the van and Gia limped after him. He helped her
up and across the driver’s seat to sit on the passenger’s side. He stepped in
and pulled the driver’s door with a creak before it slammed.

***

He turned the key in the ignition and the starter screamed and ground at
him. He made a face and said, “Already started.”

The engine rolled and hammered twice before going back to its shuddering
roll. The water from the pipes rained over the roof still.

Gia looked back in the back at the empty storage area with the wheel
wells jutting up and out into the space. A coil roller hung on the wall of the
van with a jumper cable clamp dangling down and swaying like a threat. The
black paint over the back windows was running down and away in dirty smears.
She tried to swallow and her throat went dry remembering her ordeal in the back
for two days.

She considered putting the gun back against Justin’s temple. She would
fire even though it would shatter the window beside him. She’d push his body
out for Susan to find and she would drive back to California in two sixteen
hour stretches with the engine hammering. She would be cold at night with the
window busted, but she wouldn’t have to eat chicken salad.

I’m as messed up as they are, Gia thought as the gun felt heavy in her
hand again. We started in the same place, we ran to the same soulless place,
and we ended up back in the same hole where we started all fighting to survive.

She supposed her chance to take her rage out on Justin had passed and now
they were a team. She wasn’t the kind of person to shoot her team members. That
was more a thing Susan did and maybe to a lesser degree Don.

Justin shifted into reverse with a grind from the transmission. He put a
hand behind Gia’s seat and looked into the cracked mirror on her side. “Hang
on. This might be rough, if it even works at all.”

He pushed down on the accelerator and the engine hammered four times
before it revved up and went more steadily. The bumper ground in front on the
remains of the counter, but did not pull free.

Justin let off the gas and the engine hammered twice as it slowed back
down. He turned the steering wheel over toward Gia for three rotations. She
heard the tires crunch as they shifted outside and under the van.

He revved again and the van picked up into the air a few inches before it
tore free and dropped back down. He let off, but then pushed the gas again. The
van pulled back and turned. The wheels ran over something and pitched. Whatever
it was clunked underneath them and scraped the bottom. The van lost momentum.

He stepped on the gas and spun the tires on the wet concrete before the
front wheels bumped over the top of the object. It looked like a section of the
refrigerator. He accelerated again spinning the wheels and fishtailing the back
end before he caught traction and straightened.

He kept going without slowing. The jagged wall scraped her side of the
van and tore her mirror off her door as they emerged from the building and
twisted out into the grass and the sunlight.

As they curved away, she saw the group home looked boarded up and
abandoned even without the giant hole in the side. Other buildings that looked
like sheds and barns spread out across the property beyond the clusters of pine
trees. She saw the rusted out hulk of a large, harvesting thresher with its
round, twisted blades facing her next to one of the barns.

A lump caught in her throat. She looked out of the windows on both sides
and saw no signs of Susan. The engine hammered twice, rattled like it was
threatening to quit, and then rolled steady again.

“Get us out of here,” Gia said.

Justin ground the gears into drive and they bobbed forward along the
grass past the group home building. They circled around the front and bottomed
out as they rolled up onto a graveled road.

Justin rested one elbow on the door as he steered them along the trail.
Gia could almost believe they were on a pleasant Sunday drive. It almost made
her angry to see his casual posture. She wasn’t even sure what day it was and
she didn’t feel like asking. All horror movies started with some version of
what appeared to be the casual Sunday drive.

The gravel trail gave way to a paved road that weaved down the steep
switchback of the hill. She thought about Old Pastor Jack and at what stage he
would have discovered he had no brakes. Justin was using his quite liberally to
keep the van under control. Gia wasn’t sure what car Pastor Jack had been
driving. She honestly didn’t remember what car her mother drove either.

Justin’s posture shifted and he grabbed the wheel with both hands. He
pressed the accelerator causing the engine to hammer more than it fired evenly.
The driver’s side wheels of the van skirted the edge kicked rocks up
underneath.

Justin swerved back with the next curve of the switchback, but he didn’t
slow down.

Gia gribbed the edge of her seat with the hand not gripping the gun.
“What the hell are you doing?”

Justin didn’t answer as he stared into his side mirror more than the
road.

Gia started to yell out her question again, but then they were struck
from behind lifting the back end of the van off the street. By the time they
slammed back down, they were careening toward the edge. Justin swerved hard to
the right to keep up with the curve, but Gia was still sure they were going
over.

“What’s going on?” she shouted.

He slowed slightly to make the next curve to the left. The engine sledge
hammered with every strike of the pistons now rocking the entire vehicle.

They were smashed from behind again lunging them forward into the curve.
The sides buckled outward on the walls of the storage section. The back doors
snapped off their hinges and fell away from the van entirely.

Gia turned in time to see that the falling doors were still bound
together by the latch in the middle as they fell. They struck the pavement
behind the van and broke apart from one another spinning as they separated.

Gia thought, some bonds can’t survive a fall. She was not sure where that
was from before it came into her head.

As she stared into the grill of a large truck behind them, the thought
slipped away. The doors slammed up under the tires and the truck swerved from
side to side. The truck slowed as it regained control and fell back allowing
Justin to put some distance between them as he negotiated the unforgiving
curves.

As the truck fell back, Gia saw that it was a flatbed and quite large.
The engine of the pursuing vehicle growled with the change in power. Gia saw
through the windshield and the face she saw staring back was the dead eyed mask
of the owl. Susan still wore the soaked, blue pajama top below the masked face.

Gia felt two waves of emotion with cold fear and hot anger swirling
inside her.

Gia yelled over the swirling air from the open back and the hammer of the
engine trying to shake them apart. “We have to get away from her.”

“I’m trying,” he said using his whole weight to pull the steering wheel
with each turn. She wondered if the power steering was out. “Should we head
toward Dark Orchard and try to get help?”

“It may be too far,” Gia said.

“Do you know any houses or people between here and there?”

Gia shook her head. She didn’t know anyone between here and LA “Go over
the bridge. The bar is there. We can try to call for help.”

“It’s probably closed,” Justin said.

“This van may not make it anywhere farther away.”

“Okay, hold on.”

Justin made the turn at the bottom of the hill and bottomed out again. As
he tried to make the straight away, Gia saw the bridge ahead. The van shifted
from side to side as the engine hammered.

“Get it under control, Justin.”

“I’m trying. I think something is bent.”

The flatbed made the turn and closed the distance. Gia looked back into
the dark sockets of the owl. The truck smashed the back of the van lifting it
up and slamming it back down.

They swerved onto the bridge and the tone under the tires changed as she
saw the river out between the girders. The flatbed slammed them again. The
wheels locked and they began to twist. The flatbed was pushing them along.

Gia thumbed off the safety on the gun and aimed back through the van. She
fired into the grill of the truck. There was a spark and steam sprayed out of
the truck humid into the van with them.

The truck dropped back on the bridge to where Gia could see the owl
again. It sped up with more spraying steam toward them as the van slid and
drifted to the side out of its lane.

Gia fired two more shots punching white holes in the windshield. The owl
dropped out of sight and the truck started to coast. Gia pulled the trigger a
third time, but the mechanism wouldn’t budge. She did not know if it was jammed
or empty.

The van continued to drift and smashed into the girders. The doors came
off both sides and Gia was thrown out of her seat backward into the dashboard.

She lost her grip on the gun and it sailed out of her hand out the open
door. She turned to see it spin in empty space down into the river several feet
below. The van tipped toward its nose threatening to continue its spill out
into the river.

She pulled Justin by his shoulder and he lifted his face off the steering
wheel. His nose and mouth were bloodied.

***