Home is the only place she can go, she realizes.
A few minutes after she reaches the road, her flashlight beam finds the other biker’s legs. Once she runs it up his body, she sees his waist is twisted at a grotesque angle from the rest of him, his head a mound of gore. No way did he manage to call for help. The desert’s ghostly quiet.
She starts in the direction of her house. After a few seconds, she begins to run. She’s afraid too much exertion might flush from her system whatever insane combination of hormones is giving her this strength. But she’d rather take that risk than meet more bikers out here in the dark.
9
As the door descends behind her, Charlotte uses the keypad inside the garage to search her security system’s recent history.
Somehow Jason managed to crack her code. The proof’s right in front of her.
SYSTEM ENTRY 5:36 p.m.
Automatic reengagement happened three minutes after.
Next comes her arrival, two hours later, followed by her departure twenty minutes after that.
Twenty minutes. Jason’s attack, overpowering him, binding him—was that really all it took?
She draws her Beretta. The metal depresses under her grip before she softens her hand.
Bedrooms, closets, bathrooms—all empty.
Not the kitchen.
Jason’s still trussed up like a pig, but he’s managed to squirm away from the debris left by their struggle in the living room. Exhaustion or pain from his injuries has overtaken him. He’s rag-doll limp. But he’s definitely alive. When he sees her coming down the hallway, his eyes widen, then narrow when he realizes she’s alone.
Something uncurls in her at the sight of him. Something hungry and feral and ready to strike.
When she’s a few steps away from him, he whines into the duct tape across his mouth, starts wiggling backward in a desperate attempt to escape. He seems to be remembering what she’s capable of. It’s good to be reminded, because there were a few moments during the strange, silent trek back to her house when she thought her night so far might have been one giant hallucination.
And what causes hallucinations?
Drugs.
Drugs like the one she’s on now, the one Dylan gave her.
But Jason’s fear is too real to be a hallucination. If this truly is all some giant drug reaction, it sure as hell isn’t the kind they warn you about on TV commercials.
She reminds herself what she came here to do. A phone. I need a phone.
She checks to make sure the base station for her phone system is in its usual spot, on a table in the hallway, just by the entrance to the kitchen. It is. There’s even a handset in the cradle. But when she traces the cord down to the outlet, she sees that it’s dangling inches from a new hole in the wall.
Jason removed the entire socket. Even if she could find it, she’d need a technician to plug it back in and rewire it. He didn’t just cut the cord. He didn’t just unplug the phone. He made sure there was no way she could easily reconnect if a struggle went in her favor. And if the landline’s out, that means no using the alarm’s panic button to summon Scarlet PD, who are forty minutes away at best. She checks the outlet in her bedroom. It’s in the exact same condition.
Her pulse roars in her ears.
She’s afraid again, but for entirely different reasons. What scares her now is that the pathetic sounds Jason’s making when she returns to the kitchen don’t inspire revulsion, much less pity. Instead they seem like information. The way a caribou’s limp is information to a hungry wolf.
Is this the drug, too? she thinks. Is it giving me more than just strength? Is it silencing my soul, removing my remorse? Or does remorse always leave once you have the power to indulge your worst instincts with impunity?
As gently as she can, she grips him by one shoulder and pulls him away from the cabinet until he’s lying flat on the floor.
She gazes into his eyes. Studies the fear there.
She’s savoring it. There’s no other word for it. And he can see this, and it terrifies him more.
For the first time in months, she tries to summon memories of her grandmother. Her grief made the effort too painful before. But in this moment, it’s Luanne’s voice she needs more than any other. She needs some of the wisdom the woman acquired during the years she spent not knowing what had become of her daughter and granddaughter. Without Luanne’s moral clarity, Charlotte might do something terrible. Something that can’t be reversed. Something that will haunt her long after she finds a way to understand just what the fuck is happening to her body right now.
When we hurt people just to punish them, Luanne used to say, we create a darkness that will live on long after our reasons for giving birth to it have faded.
A phone, she reminds herself. What I need is a phone. I don’t need to see Jason Briffel suffer. I just need a goddamn phone.
In each hand, she gently grips the tops of his front pockets. Then, with almost no effort, she peels the flaps away from their stitching until both pockets have been butterflied. As the stitches rip, tears sprout from Jason’s eyes. There’s nothing painful about the process; it’s the sound of it, she figures. Maybe it makes him imagine his flesh being flayed from his bones.
Poor baby.
His key ring slides out from one opened pocket. The chunky fob for a Honda hits the floor with a light thud. But no cell phone.
She reaches for the tape across his mouth, pokes through the middle of it with one thumb. A tiny gesture, but it makes a pop like smacking gum. Suddenly Jason’s breath starts whistling through the fresh hole. Slowly and carefully dragging both index fingers in opposite directions, she turns the hole into a slit. Under normal circumstances this would have required a knife. Right now she barely has to exert any pressure at all.
Where’s your phone, asshole? she wants to say. But what comes out of her mouth is, “What were you going to do to me, Jason?”
“Please . . .”
“Please, what? What did you come here for?”
His phone, she thinks. Just get his phone.
“I told you,” he whispers. “I came to set you free.”
“With rope and duct tape and my guns? You really believe that? You really think I’ll be your Abigail? That I’ll find you women to rape and then murder them for you?”
“Why is it so hard for you to see that people care about you, Trina?”
“That is not my fucking name anymore, you sick, crazy shit.” At first she thinks he’s crying out because he’s afraid, or because she’s brought her nose to his and rage quaked in every syllable she just snarled. Then she feels something crunch in her hand. It’s his right shoulder. She grabbed it without realizing it. She’s broken it.
The sounds he makes now are more barking dog than sniveling child.
Her hand feels hot. Shame clogs her throat. Before she can stop herself, she’s skittering backward until she slams into the wall behind her. For a second she thinks she paralyzed herself. Then she realizes the back of her skull punched into the wall on impact. It takes her a few seconds to pull it free. When she steps forward, plaster chips tumble down her back.
Why? How could she watch what happened to those bikers as if it were just a movie but the sound of Jason’s agony threatens to send her into a panic?
What brought her remorse back now?
Maybe it’s because Jason isn’t holding a sawed-off shotgun and calling her a cunt. Yes, he came to do her harm, but he’s not capable of it right now, and she just broke his shoulder in the blink of an eye. Without meaning to. And that means it wasn’t self-defense.
It was torture. And how will torture save her from this night? What will it do other than take her back to the Bannings’ farm in her mind?