I stood up and rushed backward. Sarah screamed. The chair came up at a forty-five-degree angle, my butt still attached to it, my body hunched over. The legs of the chair tangled with Rick's, and the weight of my coming after him propelled him into the vertical blinds that hung over the sliding glass doors to the deck. Rick's arms flailed, grabbing slats, ripping them from their moorings as I squeezed him against the door.
I took a step away, bound to the chair but my arms still free, and spun around. I threw myself into him, punching randomly. Except for Rick, a few hours earlier, I'd never hit anyone in my adult life. And the last time I'd hit him, I'd used a robot. This time, I was connecting with my hands, and the pain traveled straight up my arms and into my shoulders, which still hurt from dangling from that roof peak.
"You fucker!" Rick screamed, and shoved back. It was only reasonable to expect that a guy who'd spent several years working in construction, when he wasn't in jail probably lifting weights, was going to have stronger arms than a guy who daydreams at a computer all day. When he shoved, his arms were like pistons, driving me back across the kitchen and into a set of floor-to-ceiling cupboards. The chair hit them first, and inside I could hear stacked cans rattle and fall over.
Sarah kept screaming.
Rick ducked down, rushed me, grabbed me around my taped waist, and dragged me and the chair down to the floor. Then the pummeling began. This was very serious pummeling. I felt his fist connect with my chin, then my right cheek, bounce off my forehead, crush my lip. Blood filled my mouth where my tooth had gone through it. Some time around then, I started blacking out.
This was not good. This was not good at all.
o o o
Chapter 26
I was vaguely aware of the sound of more duct tape being ripped from the roll, and of Sarah's voice.
"Zack? Can you hear me? Zack? Zack, say something."
It was like coming out of a deep sleep, except this time, while snoozing, someone had rearranged my body parts. My head, hanging down on my chest, was throbbing, and I could hardly see anything out of my left eye, or focus very well with the other.
"Zack, you there? He's in the other room. Zack, what's happening?"
I went to stretch, like I normally do when coming out of a deep sleep, but very little of me moved. My legs were held in place, and my left hand was trapped at my left side. Only my right arm was free.
My right eye was starting to focus, and I saw that I was pushed up to the kitchen table. I found the strength to lift my head up slightly, and confirmed that all that had happened before wasn't some bad dream. I was still in my kitchen, Sarah was still tied up in a chair across from me. And I was tied into a chair, too.
I was in a great deal of pain.
I looked over at Sarah and tried to smile, but using those muscles made me wince.
"Zack," she said. "Zack, can you understand me? Can you hear me?"
I nodded. God, it hurt.
"Who is that man? Why does he want to kill us? What's this ledger he's talking about? What on earth is going on?"
"Fucked up," I mumbled. "Big time."
"What? What did you do?"
"The purse. I took that woman's purse, at the grocery store. I thought it was yours." I paused. "Big mistake."
Sarah took it in. "My God," she said. "But I was wearing my fanny pack. You were trying to teach me a lesson and ..."
"If it had been anybody else's purse," I whispered. "Any purse but that one ..."
"Zack, stay awake. We've got to get out of here. This guy's crazy. I think he's going to kill us, even if you give him this ledger he's asking about. Do the police really have it? Because if they don't, just give it to him. Give him whatever he wants."
I nodded weakly. "I've got some more bad news," I said.
"What?" she said, holding her breath.
"I don't have anything for your birthday. I know you thought I was up to something, you know, about a gift. But I haven't gotten to it yet."
Sarah's eyes glistened, and she sighed. "That's okay," she said. "It's not actually until tomorrow."
I attempted another nod. "We'll pick something out later today. Something nice."
"Sure," she said, fighting to keep it together.
"And maybe after that, we'll go out for dinner, come home and celebrate. I'm okay, you know."
"You're not okay. You need to get to a doctor."
"No no, I mean, you know. My plumbing. It's perfectly operational. I just had a lot on my mind, earlier."
"Hey," said Rick, strolling back into the kitchen. "This it?" he asked, and dumped a stack of white paper, several hundred pages' worth, on the kitchen table. I struggled to look at it.
"Is this what?" I asked.
"The book. I was looking around in there, found this, it's lots of typed pages, so I figured that was it."
I knew that was it. "Yeah," I said. "It's yours. Go somewhere and read it."
"Naw, I'll just take it with me. But just tell me, since the last chapter's missing, how does it end?"
I blinked to get some blood out of my eye. "It turns out there is no God after all," I said.