Slash, page 15
“Why?” Heather asked, sniffing back the remnants of her tears.
“Vince said it before. Who was the kid running from that he was so desperate to get away?”
“Jerry said he was the police. He was trespassing. Naturally he’d run,” Heather said.
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“I said to shut your freaking mouth,” Jerry said.
The running figure was getting closer but still out of the reach of their lights. Todd silently urged them to hurry up so he could get out of the Hayden. He never wanted to see this place again.
“It’s a girl,” Vince said, his light catching a shock of bright pink hair. A few seconds later, they could see the mascara running down her face.
“Taylor!” she shouted.
Todd looked back at the dead boy. Now that he had a name, it somehow made everything even worse.
The girl pulled up ten feet from them, shielding her eyes from their flashlight beams. “Have you seen my friend Taylor?” She was dressed all in black with laced-up jackboots. Todd knew a final girl fan when he saw one. She saw Jerry holding on to a trussed-up Sharon and gasped, backpedaling away.
“No, please don’t hurt me.”
Heather muscled her way forward. “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”
What would she think when she saw Taylor’s body? Todd was dizzy from the surreal turn of events.
When Heather reached out for her, the girl swatted her hands away. “Don’t touch me!”
That’s when Todd saw the big tear in the upper sleeve of her jacket. He shined his light on her arm. Was that blood beneath the tear?
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“Just get away from me,” she said, oblivious to him. “Taylor! Taylor! Where are you?”
Todd nudged Jerry. “Look.”
“She might have snagged it getting over the fence.” Then he said to the girl, “Look, I’m a cop. I’m not here to arrest you. I just need you to calm down.”
The girl stopped but she had a feral look in her eyes. The slightest wrong move would send her running again.
“Are you hurt?” Todd asked. It was too difficult to see properly in the dark and with her jittering back and forth. Maybe the jacket had always been torn. That was the big style with teens.
She absently touched her arm along the tear but didn’t answer him.
“Have you seen my friend?” she asked. “I…I thought I heard a gunshot or something. We got separated back there. I just want to find him and get out of here.”
“What’s your name?” Jerry asked calmly. She looked at Sharon in his grasp and her bottom lip trembled.
“Why do you have her tied up if you’re a cop?”
“Because unlike you, she’s under arrest and this is the best I can do at the moment.”
The girl’s eyes roamed from person to person, as if deciding whether she would answer or take off running again. When she settled on Heather, she said, “Kaitlin.”
“Okay, Kaitlin, what were you and your friend Taylor doing here?” Jerry asked.
“We…we just wanted to see it before it was all torn down.”
Todd said, “Are you one of the final girl followers?”
She turned to him with wet eyes. “Yeah. I know it was stupid but Taylor had his mind set. We didn’t go very far when I said I wanted to leave. It just felt, I don’t know, wrong to be here. But Taylor wanted to see more. He said we’d just go see the pool and then we could go back.”
“And did you?” Vince said.
“What?”
“Go to the pool?”
Kaitlin took a shaky breath. If Taylor was seventeen, she was fifteen tops. As much as Todd wanted to hate her for being a final girl follower, he couldn’t help wanting to hold her and protect her from what was about to come. Should they even tell her that Taylor was dead? It might make getting her to come with them exceedingly difficult.
“Yeah, we did. We weren’t in there long when we heard something crash. We couldn’t see what it was. The whole building looks like it’s ready to fall down. So I ran. Taylor ran after me. But then, like, we came to the trees and I ran into a branch or something.” She looked over at her torn jacket, her fingers prodding within, and winced. “At least I think I did. We got turned around in the trees and we heard something breaking and there was shouting. We kinda freaked out. We both took off, but I lost him in the trees.”
Todd looked at Vince. They must have heard his friend falling through the rotted rink wall.
“Please, can you tell me if you saw my friend?” Kaitlin asked. She hopped in place. “This place is freaking me out and I just wanna go home.” More tears came, another coat of her thick mascara trailing down her face like lava.
“We’ll take you home,” Heather said. “We just need you to stay with us.”
Kaitlin shook her head. “Not without Taylor. I’m not leaving him here. Maybe you can help me find him.”
Todd and his friends looked to each other. There was no hiding the fact that they weren’t telling her everything and she knew it.
“What?” Kaitlin asked.
“Look, Kaitlin,” Heather began.
“What did you do to Taylor?” Her eyes focused on Sharon and Jerry. “You’re not a cop, are you?”
“Trust me, I am. My badge is in my jacket. I can show you. Vince, can you show her?”
“I knew we weren’t the only ones here,” Kaitlin said. “Were you tracking us? I kept telling Taylor we were being followed.”
“We weren’t following you,” Todd said. “As far as we knew, we were the only ones here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“How about this?” Vince found Jerry’s badge in his coat and flipped it open, shining his light on it.
“How do I know it’s even real?”
Todd watched her feet. She was getting ready to run.
Kaitlin said, “Just let me go and I won’t tell anyone I saw you, okay?”
Vince and Heather angled themselves so Kaitlin couldn’t see Taylor’s body behind them.
“It’s best if we stick together,” Heather said. “But we’re not going to make you do something you don’t want to do.”
“Who the fuck is that?” Sharon said.
“What are you talking about?” Jerry said.
Todd turned to where Sharon was staring. In the distance, perhaps more than a hundred yards out, another person was making their way toward them. Kaitlin turned around and shouted, “Taylor!”
The person stopped, and then began to run as if anxious to reunite with Kaitlin.
“If that’s Taylor, who’s he?” Todd whispered to Vince, casting a quick glance at the body behind them.
“What’s he doing?” Sharon said.
Todd tuned back around.
The running figure arced his arm back and swung it forward like a quarterback on the run after the pocket had collapsed.
“Taylor!” Kaitlin shouted, waving her arms and running away from them.
There was a loud pop, followed by what sounded like a bundle of sticks being snapped over someone’s knee.
Todd saw Kaitlin’s head whip back so far, it bounced off the space between her shoulder blades. Her arms flopped to her sides but she kept running, her dead eyes staring at him as her head bobbed against her back.
Chapter Twenty
Todd wasn’t sure which one of them screamed first.
Jerry caught Kaitlin’s still-moving body in his light. Todd saw the small spear of rebar protruding from her forehead a moment before her legs finally collapsed. She hit the ground hard, but her body still jittered.
“What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?” Bill blurted, his fingers tearing at his hair.
Jerry let Sharon go and pulled his gun from his holster.
“Get down on the ground now,” he shouted in a voice that could have been heard two counties over. Todd had never heard his full ‘cop voice’ before and he almost inched toward the ground himself.
The man stopped about seventy yards shy of their position.
“I said get down, motherfucker!”
No one made a move toward Kaitlin. Her left leg vibrated like a fish on land.
Todd’s hand flexed on the gun.
How could someone that far away throw a hunk of rebar and not only hit the target, but hit it so hard it went through her skull and snapped her neck in half?
They couldn’t. Plain and simple.
Todd raised the gun. He had no idea if he could hit the broadside of a barn at the moment or if the gun had enough range to reach the still figure.
“You hear me?” Jerry yelled. “I said get…the…fuck…down! Now!”
They watched as the figure reached for something in his pocket. It was too hard to make out what he extracted, but there was definitely something in his hand.
Jerry went into action, rushing forward with both hands on his gun, barking over and over for the man to put the weapon down.
When the man didn’t, Jerry pulled the trigger.
There was no way to tell if the shot hit the man, though he stood his ground and didn’t appear the least bit hurt.
“Last time, asshole,” Jerry warned, still advancing.
“Shoot him,” Sharon implored.
Todd was going to tell her to be quiet, that two dead people was enough, when he saw that she’d gotten her hands free and was making a beeline for him and the gun. He tensed up, waiting for the inevitable collision. She reached for his arm but he spun away. When she regained her footing and went to go for the gun again, Vince wrapped her up from behind.
“Get the hell off me!”
“Holy shit!” Bill exclaimed. “Look at him go.”
Even Sharon stopped her struggling to watch the man take off for the nearest tree line. He moved so fast, he was just a blur. One second he was there, the next he was swallowed up by the young forest.
“H-h-how?” Heather choked.
“You ever see anything like that?” Bill said to Jerry.
He still had his gun out, his head cocked, listening for sounds of the running man. It was as if he’d simply disappeared. There were dead crunchy leaves and detritus everywhere. It was almost impossible to run without making a sound.
After waiting several beats, Jerry holstered his gun and got on one knee to check on Kaitlin. He didn’t need to check her pulse to know she was dead. Her face was smashed into the earth even though she’d collapsed on her back. Mercifully, her body had finally gone still.
“Toss me my jacket,” he said.
Todd scooped it off the ground and brought it over. Jerry took out his gloves and touched the rebar. It looked as if it had been snapped off on both ends so they came to jagged but sharp points.
“How the hell did he do this?” Jerry said.
“Are we sure it’s a he?” Todd said.
“You see the size of him? And that cannon for an arm? Has to be a guy.”
“How was he able to run so fast?” Todd asked.
A howling wind roared through the Hayden, bringing Todd’s hackles to attention.
“Must be high on something,” Jerry said. “But what I have no clue.”
Sharon jerked herself free from Vince’s locked arms. “Are you guys stupid or what? That was the Wraith.”
“Oh, just like that kid over there was the Wraith,” Jerry said.
“At least now we know who they were running from,” she said.
Steam rose from the hole in Kaitlin’s head. Todd moved away, horrified by the thought of those vapors touching his skin or getting in his nose.
“Now what do we do?” Bill said.
“You’re still getting out of here and getting help,” Jerry said.
“Unh-uh,” Bill said. “I’m not going anywhere knowing that guy is still around.”
“Okay, then you can wait with me and Sharon,” Jerry said.
Bill spun in a tight circle. “Fuck me.”
“Maybe Bill’s right,” Vince said. “We should find a place to hole up until daylight. Walking around in the dark, even if we have a gun, it’s too risky. Whoever is out there he’s strong and fast and I’ll bet knows this place a hell of a lot better than we do.”
Jerry looked to Todd. “We have him outnumbered, even if we split up.”
Todd couldn’t help feeling that Sharon was right. The coincidence that there just happened to be another murderer in the Hayden on the night before its demise – or maybe not after they revealed what had been happening here – was too vast to seriously consider. And if that was the Wraith, he was adept at killing, not to mention in possession of incredible speed and strength. Todd wasn’t sure how much good Sharon’s .38 would do against him, if they could even hit him.
“We could try one of the bungalows,” Heather said. They were in shambles and poor protection, but at least they were in the opposite direction from where the man had slipped away.
“At least we’ll have a wall at our backs,” Bill said. “The odds of getting out of here increase a hell of a lot if we’re not out in the open.”
“What kind of odds are we talking?” Todd asked. He knew that if he engaged Bill with his favorite topic – gambling – it might help to keep him focused.
“At least three-to-one,” he replied.
“I like those odds.”
“Fine, we’ll hide out in one of the bungalows,” Jerry said.
“What do we do about them?” Todd asked, nodding toward the bodies. “Should we bring them with us?”
“No fucking way,” Sharon objected.
“No one’s asking you,” Jerry said. “We have to leave them here. I’ve screwed up enough tonight as it is. I’m not going to destroy a crime scene.”
“I’m not going to lie and say I’m not relieved,” Heather said. “I don’t think I could stay in one of those tiny bungalows right next to two dead people.”
Vince said, “We better get going before he shows up again. Something tells me your gun won’t scare him away for long.”
Todd saw the shrouded bungalows two hundred yards to the north. Between them and shelter was a lot of wide-open space. “Of course there are trees everywhere but here,” he said.
“You guys start running,” Jerry said. “I’ll watch your backs.”
Sharon held out her hands. “What, you don’t want to tie me up?”
“You’ll need them free for balance when you run,” he said. “I want you alive so I can book you. If you feel like separating from us, I’m sure our friend out there will be more than happy to meet up with you.”
She snorted at him with disgust and went to Heather.
“I can hang back with you,” Todd said.
Jerry patted him on the shoulder. “You take the lead. You have a gun.”
“I’m sorry I got you all mixed up in this.”
“Don’t be. There’s no way we could have known it would all go tits up.”
“Actually, there was.”
He thought about Ash and her friends and the sheer terror they must have felt. Was this the same man that had taken them down one by one five years ago? Had he never left the grounds? Or had he heard Todd’s entreaty and was only too happy to oblige? Either way, Todd wasn’t sure how they would fare if they crossed paths again, even with their advantage in numbers in firepower. Just look what he’d done with a rusted section of rebar. Todd couldn’t believe his foolishness at baiting the madman to come get him. When wishes came true, there was always a price, some more terrible than others.
“It’s a straight shot from here,” Jerry said, pointing to the bungalows. “Just go into the first one that’s not boarded up. Bill’s right, it’s smart to have a wall at our backs.”
“The man knows his odds.”
“That he does. Maybe we can even fortify the place a little. Then it’s just a matter of sitting tight for a few hours.”
Todd wondered if someone in Ash’s party had said the very same thing. “Will do, cowboy. Just don’t hang back too far. We need to walk out of this cursed place together.”
“Just be careful. There may be other final girl kids out here. Only shoot if you know exactly who you’re shooting at.”
Todd tucked the gun in his pocket. “Then maybe I shouldn’t shoot at all, because I have no clue what that guy looks like.”
“If he’s the size of a gorilla and running like a speeding car, you can assume it’s him.”
Todd nodded and trotted to his friends. “Everyone follow me. Just run like your ass is on fire.”
Bill was already breathing heavy and he hadn’t taken a step. “Normally I’d complain about all this cardio, but you don’t have to worry about me holding you guys up. Fear is a great motivator.”
“Sharon, please don’t do anything stupid,” Todd said.
“She won’t,” Heather answered for her. Sharon just stared ahead. Vince’s head was on a swivel, looking for any signs of the return of the killer.
“Okay,” Todd said. “Let’s go.”
He took off at a full gallop. He didn’t need to check behind him to make sure they were keeping up. He could hear the pounding of their feet close behind.
As Todd ran, he shot quick glances to his left and right, wary of the killer coming for them. He wished he had night vision glasses. The camera had limited range and it would be impossible to run and keep it close to his face and steady enough to see.
He spotted a bungalow with an open doorway. He hoped the rats were at a minimum inside.
“Right there,” he shouted, veering to his right. Four sets of feet thumped close at his heels.
Todd spotted a random pile of cinder blocks a split second before he ended up tumbling over them. He leaped over the pile. Something shifted in his pocket. When he landed, there was an extra thud.
Shit. The gun!
He pulled up and turned around. Sharon and Heather jumped over the cinder blocks while Vince and Bill gave them wide berth.
