Mountain Madness (10 page)

The man spun the steering wheel and turned onto one of the unmarked dirt roads, whistling something that sounded similar to the theme from the Superman movies. Almost, but not quite, like the man had gotten Superman and something else crossed up in his mind and turned the two of them into something all his own.

Zach ground his teeth and prayed he could get out of the truck. He’d almost stopped noticing the smell of blood, but he didn’t think he’d ever get used to the man’s blood-streaked face or his wide, maniacal eyes. He didn’t
want
to get used to them. If he ever thought these kinds of things were normal, he’d be crazier than the kidnapper.

Kidnapper
. The word entered Zach’s mind for the first time, although it was clearly the perfect word for the situation. He’d been kidnapped, and the whistling, bloody weirdo who claimed to have killed his mother was his kidnapper.

Zach could blink back the tears at the thought of his mother only because he didn’t really believe she was dead, despite the blood and the man’s claims. He couldn’t believe it. He
wouldn’t
. Hurt, maybe, but not dead. After he got help, they’d go and they’d find her and she would be fine. Just fine.

The pain above his eye flashed. He risked a glance at the driver, whose eerie whistling had quieted a little but hadn’t stopped. The long sweaty lines down the sides of his face made him look scarred. Zach wished he
could
scar the guy. Scar him or worse.

He never should have run. His mom was back home right that minute, bleeding and hurt. Maybe hurt bad. He shouldn’t have run. He should have stayed and fought the guy, grabbed a knife from the drawer or a frying pan to bash in his head. Something. And he definitely shouldn’t have gone up to his tree fort. God, that had been such a stupid move; he’d treed himself like an idiot raccoon. Although he wasn’t sure how the guy could have
known
it. Zach had watched him leave the house and come straight toward him, not looking around, not searching, just flying right at him like he’d had Zach on his radar the whole time.

They made another left, and Zach felt the thing in his pocket punch into his leg again. It was his mother’s, really—Zach had gone back to her bedroom to get it for her before any of this mess had started—and he couldn’t wait to give it back to her, but for now he needed it more than he’d ever needed anything in his life.

He only hoped she’d set it to silent, or at least vibrate—otherwise one mistimed call might ruin everything. He still had a chance, if the guy didn’t check his pockets when they stopped, and the cell phone got reception wherever they were going, and, of course, the guy didn’t kill him somewhere between here and there.

Ignoring the hiss from the radio and the whistling that sounded as if it had come from the soundtrack to the kind of late-night horror movie he was never supposed to see, Zach continued watching for road signs. He wouldn’t give up until one of the two of them was dead.

ELEVEN

“I GUESS YOU
found it.”

Trevor heard his daddy’s voice from out by the sinks, where he’d blow-dried the shoes with the automatic hand dryer.

“Not only was it still there,” said Mommy. Trevor hadn’t heard her come in, only realized she had when she responded to Daddy. “There was a woman guarding it for me. Eating a slice of pepperoni and waiting for me to come back. She said she knew I wouldn’t get far.”

Trevor had returned to the toilet seat not because it was any cleaner than standing on the floor, but just because he was tired of standing.

“—left in the world,” his daddy finished. Trevor missed the first part.

“Yeah,” Mommy said, and then there was a crackling like someone digging through plastic bags. Trevor wondered if there were any other boys out there (besides his daddy, anyway), and what they thought of a girl in their bathroom. Sometimes his mom could be pretty silly.

Daddy brought him the clothes, along with his cleaned sneakers, and he accepted them through the cracked stall door while keeping one hand cupped over his thingy. He guessed Mommy had seen him naked just as much as Daddy, but Daddy had already seen all that Trevor planned to show today, and that was enough peeping.

Mom had gotten him a pair of brown shorts and some underwear that were plain and white and boring. He didn’t consider them a very good trade for the clothes he’d ruined, but he wouldn’t say anything. He knew they didn’t have a whole lot of extra money. Sometimes his mommy couldn’t pay the bills on time and she got charged
latefees
. Trevor didn’t know what
latefees
were exactly, but he knew they were bad and that they meant spending more money. In Trevor’s mind,
latefees
was almost a curse word, and he never said it out loud.

The Gohan action figure he’d gotten at the toy store had already been a good surprise, and now he’d gotten new clothes on top of it. He didn’t know for sure how much those sorts of things cost, but he did know it was something, and that something was more than nothing. He put on the new clothes with mixed feelings. While he was ashamed at what he’d done and felt more than just a little guilty about the spent money—even if he didn’t totally understand things like
bug jets
—he was also happy to be getting into a clean pair of shorts. Standing around half naked in a mall bathroom wasn’t exactly his idea of comfortable.

The new socks, like the undies, were simple white things without even a red stripe at the toe, but Trevor didn’t care too much. Socks were socks. They kept your shoes from getting extra stinky and the chiggers from biting your ankles in the summertime, but otherwise they were worthless.

His dad had done a pretty good job wiping the poop off the floor around the toilet, but the stall was still nowhere near clean. Trevor didn’t want to move around any more than he had to until he’d gotten his shoes on, didn’t want to get his new socks dirty whether they were worthless or not. He’d noticed a wad of yellowed toilet paper in the corner beside a spider’s web when he tried to clean himself earlier. It was still there, along with a sticky-looking puddle of goo that looked like part potty, part spit, part blood, and
all
gross.

He slipped into the sneakers, and although he was not yet an expert lacer, he managed to tie himself a nice pair of looping knots that he figured were far from failures. Daddy had held the shoes under the hand dryer for a long time and gotten them mostly dried out, but they still squished a little when Trevor moved. No big deal. At least he was cleaned up. Who cared if he walked around sounding like the Swamp Thing?

He turned the latch on the stall door and exited with his head hanging. When his mommy ran to him and cupped his chin, lifted his face to hers and gave him a slobbery kiss on the nose, he couldn’t help but smile. She hugged him so tight it hurt, but he didn’t push away or tell her to take it easy because it also felt good.

Only after she’d finally let go of him, looking happy but also a little wet eyed, did Trevor finger the sides of his new shorts and say, “What do you think?”

Daddy said, “Sharp.”

And Mommy said, “As a razor.”

Trevor didn’t get it, but the two of them shared a smile, which was good. There had been enough yelling between his mommy and daddy to last Trevor a lifetime. He was always glad for the smiles.

His t-shirt had a pocket on the front—a
nerd pocket
is what some of his friends at school would call it—but Trevor had always liked extra pockets. Batman had a whole belt full of pockets, and something neat inside each one, and nobody called
him
nerdy. Trevor reached into the pocket and pulled out the crumpled five-dollar bill his mom had given him earlier. The shirt pocket had been the first one Trevor found when he’d scrambled for someplace to stash the bill on his desperate dash to the bathrooms. He hadn’t forgotten about it. The five had been his money for the merry-go-round, which he’d been looking so forward to riding.

But he didn’t think his parents would still let him go on the ride, and he certainly wouldn’t ask. He smoothed the bill out the best he could and offered it to his mommy.

“What’s this?”

Trevor pushed the money closer to her, but she didn’t take it, didn’t reach for it at all.

“I shouldn’t have asked to ride the merry-go-round,” he said and waved the bill, desperate for her to take it from him. “You should use this for the new shorts you had to buy.”

Mommy’s mouth came open like she was going to say something, but at first she didn’t. Instead, she dropped to her knees and pulled him in for another long hug. “Oh, hon,” she said finally. “You don’t need to worry about that kind of stuff.” She ran a hand through his hair and gave the back of his neck a gentle squeeze. Daddy stood by and said nothing, looked down at him the same way he had when Trevor had brought home the report card with all S’s, which was the best you could get in kindergarten.

“I’m sorry I scared you.” He wrapped his arms around his mommy’s neck and kissed her hard on the cheek.

She smiled with half her mouth, the way he’d always liked, and then patted him softly on the chest. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before the bathroom police catch me.”

“Kay.”

“And then,” she said, standing, “we’re all three of us going to ride the carousel together. How’s that sound?”

Trevor nodded. He moved between his mommy and daddy and held out a hand for each of them.

“Sounds good, Mommy,” he said. And it was.

TWELVE

THE TRUCK SKIDDED
to a stop, and Zach looked around apprehensively, part of him thinking they’d gotten to their final destination and another part believing this was the spot where he’d die. When the kidnapper got out of the pickup and circled to Zach’s door, Zach briefly considered letting himself out of the belt, scooting across the seat, and shooting through the driver’s side door. He could run again, like he had at home and back on the mountain road before the man had loaded him into the truck, but he didn’t think it would do any good. Last time, he hadn’t gotten more than a hundred feet. If he’d been a little faster maybe, or had longer legs, but it was useless, almost stupid. Tempting as it might have been, he wasn’t going to get himself out of this situation by running.

The man wrenched open the door, and Zach craned his neck around, looking for any signs of civilization.

Nothing.

Just more stinking trees. The road ahead crested and then disappeared, running downhill into whatever unseen territory lay beyond. The road behind was still half obscured by settling clouds of dust and the smoky gray exhaust from the pickup’s tailpipe. 

Zach allowed the man to unwind the seatbelt, not doing anything to help, not leaning forward when the guy yanked the belt out from behind his back. The kidnapper formerly known as Davy finally got Zach free, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled him from the cab.

“Can’t leave you here,” the Davy man said, answering a question Zach hadn’t asked. “I don’t know enough about you yet.”

You don’t know
anything
about me, you freak show
, Zach wanted to say, but he stayed quiet. When Davy set him down, the sole of Zach’s sneaker bent underneath him and he almost went sprawling, probably
would
have if the guy hadn’t grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him upright. The collar of his t-shirt dug into his neck a little, and Zach choked like a hanged man.

Davy let him go. Zach tugged down the front of his shirt until it was no longer strangling him and lifted his shoe so the sole could flip back up into its regular position.

Now that he was loose, he raised his hand to his head, not expecting blood, but touching the wound with the tips of his fingers and examining them just to be sure. No blood, as he’d guessed, but the pressure from his probing fingers had brought back the pain. He wiped his hand on the side of his shirt, though he had nothing to wipe off, and sighed.

Where were they heading? Would this guy tell him to get down on his knees and then shoot him in the back of the head like the gangsters in the television shows his mom didn’t want him watching? Or was there, somewhere in a dark grove, a shallow grave just long enough and deep enough for the man to bury Zach alive?

No. Zach wouldn’t let himself think that way, wouldn’t give in to panic.

He waited a moment to see what would happen. The man took off for the trees, and Zach followed without being asked, looking all the time for something he might use as a weapon or a hidey-hole into which he could crawl. Maybe a forest ranger would suddenly appear and whisk him off to safety, or maybe a pack of wolves would leap onto this Davy guy from out of nowhere and rip out his throat.

Yeah, right.

Zach saw the game trail before he actually stepped foot on it, but not by much. For just a moment, he thought they must have driven in a big loop and come back to where they’d started, but then the illusion ended and he realized these woods were not only much hillier than those around his house, but also rockier and less dense. Not to mention they were now moving toward the sun, and not away from it, which would have been the case on the trail back home. 

Just how many secret paths did this guy know? 

The hem of Zach’s shirt caught on a thorny branch and ripped. Zach pulled away from the snag and moved closer to the center of the trail.

“Your brother’s been missing you, you know,” Davy said, not turning around.

As with most of this lunatic’s statements, Zach didn’t understand. He had no brothers. Or sisters, for that matter. His mom and dad hadn’t thought they could have kids until Zach came along. Then Dad had died and…well, that was that.

“Been missing both of us. He’s waited a long time for today.” He pushed aside a tuft of tall weeds and continued to follow the trail. “A long time.”

Zach followed, his clapping shoe almost more annoying than the truck’s hissing radio had been, wondering if he should respond or if Crazy Dave was talking mostly to himself.