Slash, p.17
Slash, page 17
Todd’s fingers touched on something thick and heavy, more splinters piercing his flesh. Ignoring the pain, he grabbed it and ran to join Sharon, hoping they didn’t end up hitting each other. He bumped into her shoulder as she was in mid-downward stroke. The rebar clanged off the windowsill.
Up close, Todd saw the shadow of the deformed man but was mercifully spared the stark sight of his face. He jabbed the hunk of wood into the center of the shadow. It felt like battering a brick wall. The wood reverberated like a bat hitting a ball. This time, the pain went directly into his marrow. Todd dropped the wood, shaking his hands.
Sharon let out a piercing war cry and went to slam the rebar onto the killer again.
Except he was gone.
Todd yanked her away from the window, in case he was waiting for her to stick her head out looking for him.
“We need some light,” he said.
There was no sense trying to hide anymore. They needed light not only to see the killer when he returned, but also to check on the state of their wounded friends. Sharon got the flashlight from her coat pocket and snapped it on.
Heather still stood in the center of the room, bleeding and speechless. Vince was unconscious, a swelling knot protruding from the center of his forehead. Jerry had also been knocked out by a flying section of wood. Bill swayed by the door, a hunk of two-by-four still raised, but his eyes were flat and glassy. Todd could have shouted at him, asking why he didn’t help, but he was afraid his high school buddy wouldn’t have even comprehended what he was saying.
First things first. He had to stop Heather’s wrist from bleeding. He found his backpack that had been buried under shafts of wood and got his flashlight. The first aid kit was where Heather had left it.
“Keep an eye on the window, but don’t get close,” he said to Sharon.
A ragged line had been cut on her cheek and there was some blood, but physically she seemed okay.
“Did you…did you see him?” she said, her voice sounding far, far away.
“Yeah. I’m trying not to think about it at the moment. Heather, I need you to sit right there.” He led her to an overturned armoire.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He slipped the first aid kit open. “Sorry for what?”
“For not helping. I…I think I’m hurt.”
She hadn’t looked down at her wrist yet, most likely out of self-preservation. He carefully plucked the glass hilt from her and tossed it away.
“It’s okay,” he said, unwrapping the last ball of gauze in the kit. “I just need you to raise your hand over your head. Can you do that for me?”
Heather nodded. When she did, blood spilled down her arm like a waterfall for a moment, and then slowed to a trickle, much to Todd’s temporary relief. He quickly swiped the wrist wound with some antiseptic pads and got to work pushing the skin together and applying butterfly bandages. When he was done, he saw that he was out of them now too. He wrapped gauze around her wrist and applied pressure. She stayed oddly silent the entire time, not even asking about her husband.
“Bill, move Jerry away from the window,” Todd said.
Bill shook himself free from his immobility and dropped the two-by-four. “Uh, yeah, yeah, I got him.”
Jerry woke up when Bill started to slide him away from the window.
“Wuh tha fu?” Jerry slurred.
Todd was positive he’d find the side of Jerry’s head giving birth to a sizeable lump. He just had to pray he wasn’t concussed.
“You think you can keep your hand on your wrist and press it like I am?” he asked Heather.
When she started to drop her hand, he took hold of it and put it back above her head. “You have to keep it just like this. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Great. I have to check on Vince.”
Hearing her husband’s name brought an instant shiver of realization through her body. “Oh God, Vince.”
Todd flicked through the first aid kit and found the capsules of smelling salts. He cracked one open under Vince’s nose, hoping the heady ammonia smell would wake him up. If not, they were in even deeper shit.
Vince’s face puckered and his eyes fluttered open. Before Todd could move the open capsule away, Vince sat up and slapped his hand.
“What are you trying to do, kill me?” he said groggily.
Todd’s rocked back on his heels, relieved. “Just the opposite, buddy.” He looked over at Sharon. “You see him?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean he’s not close.”
Against his better judgment, he gave Sharon her gun back. “This will do better than some old rebar.”
“Thank you.” Her hand lingered on his for a moment. She was as petrified as the rest of them, but she wasn’t going to let it overwhelm her. He assumed in her line of work, she’d seen some pretty rough stuff. Nothing could prepare a person for this, but it must be helping keep her shit together.
“Jerry, you think Bill could take your gun?”
Jerry pinched his eyes. “Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t trust Bill with a BB gun.”
“Gee, thanks,” Bill said.
“Are you able to keep watch on the door then?” Todd asked.
“I can, just not from a standing position. What the hell happened?”
“While we were all looking at the door, he busted in through the window.”
Jerry lifted his good leg and rested his gun hand on his knee. “I take it he got away?”
Todd hesitated, then said, “If you can call it a he.”
“It was a chick?” Jerry said, one eyebrow arched high.
“No. Definitely not a woman.” And definitely not a final girl kid. He prayed there were no others out there now, looking for a piece of the Hayden Massacre to take home. If there were, they would never make it home. Of that he was certain.
Heather’s strength was faltering. Her upraised arm quavered. “Bill, hold Heather’s arm up, will you?”
Bill seemed happy to do whatever Todd asked him to do, as if making up for freezing earlier.
“Why does my head hurt so much?” Vince asked, his fingertips finding the bulging knot on his forehead. “What hit me?”
“A hunk of thick board,” Todd said. “You feel like you can stand?”
“A headache never kept me from walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time.” He helped Vince to his feet. Vince finally noticed Heather, saw the blood on her arm and rushed over to her. Todd let them talk. He crept to the window and stood beside Sharon.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
“He didn’t make a single sound when he walked out of the bungalow before either. Don’t let your guard down.”
She flashed him an incredulous look with her nearly black eyes. “After what I just saw? Not a chance. He shows up again, I’m emptying this gun in him.”
“Take the gun away from her,” Jerry said. “Have you lost your mind?”
“It’s all right,” Todd said.
“Hell no, it’s not all right. She’s a murderer. And you just gave her back her goddamn weapon.”
Todd knelt in front of Jerry. “You didn’t see him.”
“So what? That doesn’t mean you should weaponize the woman I have to take to jail.”
“You have to trust me on this. You didn’t see him, so you don’t know. I’d give her a freaking bazooka to cover us if I had to.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Nothing about tonight is.” To keep his mind off the horrifying images of the man in the window, Todd checked the bandaging on Jerry’s leg. It seemed to be holding up. The true test would be when Jerry tried to put any pressure on it. “I think you’ll live.”
“I hope you can say that for all of us now that you gave Bonnie Parker her gun.”
Sharon glanced at them and shook her head.
“I’m pretty sure she’s not going to shoot us,” Todd said.
“I may not, but I’m not going to jail either,” she said.
Jerry gave Todd an I told you so look.
“Sharon, you’re not making things any easier.”
“She’s right,” Bill said. “She’s not going to jail. No one’s going anywhere. There’s no way we’re ever getting out of here.”
“What happened to everyone while I was out for a few seconds?” Jerry demanded.
Bill licked his dry lips, his eyes swinging between the open window and barricaded door. “He didn’t have eyes.”
Vince, who had taken over holding Heather’s arm up, said, “What do you mean, he had no eyes?”
“Just what I said. He…had…no…eyes. Heather, you saw him. Tell him.”
Heather had gone frighteningly pale. “I didn’t see him. Everything happened so fast. The board exploded and I felt something hot on my wrist. I…I kind of blanked out for a bit.”
Bill found his two-by-four and held it with both hands. “Half of us saw him. It looked like his face had been hit by a wrecking ball. He had no eyes, but it was like he could see perfectly. I looked into where his eyes should be and…and I felt him looking back at me!”
“You mean to tell me you’re all freaking out over a blind guy?”
“He’s not blind,” Bill insisted.
“Look, buddy, if he has no eyes, he’s blind. A five-year-old could tell you that.”
“Maybe we’re mistaken,” Todd said, looking to defuse the situation. “It was only for a moment anyway before he destroyed the lantern. I saw something that looked like eyes. They were black, but it’s dark. Maybe he’s wearing some weird kind of contacts or something.”
“Whatever,” Jerry said. “We’re going to need a medical chopper to get us out of here if this keeps up.”
“Sharon got him pretty good,” Todd said.
Sheri’s sister nodded. “I think I nailed him in the shoulder. It hurt me, and I was the one holding the rebar.”
“I got a poke at him in the gut, but man, he didn’t even react,” Todd added.
“It must have done something,” Sharon said. “Because he took off right after.”
“Oh honey, sit,” Heather said.
Vince wobbled on his feet, his hands holding his head. “Just a little dizzy. It’ll pass.”
“Guess we’re not going anywhere for a while,” Jerry said.
“Not without some stretchers,” Todd replied. They might have been surrounded by four walls, but he felt entirely exposed. And now half of them were seriously wounded. There was no running out of here, that was for sure.
“How many hours till dawn?” Bill asked.
Sharon answered, “About four and a half.”
“You think we can wait it out in here?” Heather said.
Todd took a quick peek outside. The moon was hiding behind the clouds and the Hayden still looked as if it had been swallowed in black ink. “I don’t think we have a choice.”
Jerry tried to get to his feet and failed, never taking the gun off the barricade. “Well, you know what they say.”
“What’s that?” Vince asked as he slowly lowered himself to the ground.
Jerry scratched the side of his nose with the barrel of the gun. “Remember the Alamo.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Time passed interminably.
In the prolonged silence, crickets had resumed their night song. The temperature dropped to below freezing. Everyone but Jerry and Sharon had their arms wrapped around themselves. The pair of opposites were too busy keeping their guns aimed at the ports of entry to seek the illusion of warmth. Todd thought of asking Sharon for the gun, but she looked like she was far more capable than he was. There was a cooling body outside to attest to it.
Heather’s teeth chattered.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold.”
“Unzip your jacket,” Todd said.
She looked at him as if he’d asked her to dance on her head. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”
He shook her off. “Vince, you do the same. Basically, hug each other and wrap your coats around yourselves. You need some collective body heat.”
Vince unzipped his coat. “Since when did you become a nurse?”
Todd eyed the open first aid kit. Jerry’s and Heather’s bleeding had stopped and he’d treated the cut on Sharon’s cheek, even though she protested the entire time.
“I took a bunch of classes for work. There’s a lot of potential for accidents in construction. Someone has to know how to keep a guy alive until the pros arrive. Plus, I watch a lot of those dude-in-the-woods-alone survival shows. It’s television. It can’t be wrong.”
Vince huddled next to his wife. He’d complained about being nauseated a few minutes earlier. Todd wasn’t sure if it was nerves – they were all scared to death – or a concussion. He hoped for the former.
“So you only play a doctor who plays a doctor on TV,” Vince joked. His laugh was cut short by a wince of pain.
“That sounds about right.”
They’d given up whispering. The killer knew exactly where they were. They kept one flashlight on so they could see one another, and spot the maniac if and when he showed up again.
No one spoke for a while. The only sound was the chattering of teeth.
Sharon broke the stillness and said, “You know that was Otto, right?”
“Oh yeah, he’s definitely a Nazi cook who was killed forty fucking years ago,” Jerry retorted. “I mean, who else would it be?”
Sharon curled her full lip at him. “You didn’t see his face, man. I’m telling you, it was Otto. Now I know who killed my sister. I’m not leaving until that asshole is worm food.”
Heather gingerly touched her bandaged wrist. “He’s right, Sharon. It can’t be him. The staff not only killed him, they buried him, probably alive too. And even if it was Otto, he’d be like a hundred by now. The person out there is not some feeble old man.”
Sharon shifted over toward Todd and tapped his backpack – Ash’s lucky backpack – with her boot. “Watch the video again. Ash said the old man told her they beat Otto until his face was all smashed in. Don’t you think it’s odd that a man matching that same description is out there?”
Vince cupped his wife’s face in his hand. “Seeing him or not seeing him, it’s kind of impossible to think that man out there is an old, supposedly dead Nazi.”
Bill, who hadn’t said a word in a long while, leaned against the wall, exhausted. “So you’re saying we’re talking out of our asses?”
Vince turned to Todd. “Help me out here.”
Todd didn’t know what to say. Either way, he was going to piss off one of his friends. He took a while before answering, “Vince, his face was all messed up. I’m not saying he didn’t have any eyes. But his nose had definitely been broken…bad. His mouth and teeth were a mess, like they’d been kicked in.”
“Did he look like a hundred-year-old man who’d clawed his way out of a grave years before we were born?” Vince asked pointedly.
Todd chucked a pebble into the barricade. The air was frigid and sharper than a switchblade. It hurt to breathe. What he wanted to do right now was make a fire, not debate whether or not the lunatic outside was Otto or not. In the end, it didn’t matter. No matter who was out there, they were still wounded and trapped.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I do,” Sharon said.
Jerry pushed his back against the wall with his good leg and used it to leverage himself until he was standing. Todd couldn’t help staring at his friend’s leg, waiting for the bandages to break and the blood to start flowing again.
“Otto the dead hundred-year-old Nazi line cook is not our problem,” Jerry said. “Because that guy sure ain’t him.”
“You can be as blind ignorant as you want,” Sharon said. “That kind of thinking might get you killed.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then you can just skip on out of here and not take your punishment for killing that kid.”
“I didn’t know he was a kid,” Sharon said. Todd could hear her wall cracking just a bit. He saw the regret in her eyes.
“Doesn’t matter. You still smoked him,” Jerry said. He swiveled toward Todd. “And why does she still have the damn gun?”
“Sharon’s not the enemy here,” Todd protested.
“Tell that to that kid’s parents.”
Sharon raised her hands in disgust and for a scary moment leveled the gun at Jerry. “Would you lay the fuck off me?” She looked down at her hand and realized what she’d done and was quick to shift the barrel away. “I promise, you can make my life hell when we get out of here. Will that make you happy?” Nothing about her tone implied that she meant it.
Jerry edged toward the window and looked outside. “Oh, well now that you say it that way, by all means, keep your murder weapon.”
“Guys, stop it,” Todd said. He stepped between the two. “Jerry, will you chill the hell out if I took the gun?”
“It would be a start.”
He turned to Sharon and held out his hand. “Please. We can’t afford to be distracted by fighting.”
Sharon pulled away.
“Please,” Todd said.
When she exhaled, the plume of fog nearly blinded him. “Fine. I was tired of keeping watch anyway.”
Todd took the gun, the grip warm from Sharon’s hand, and joined Jerry at the window. “You think he’s close?”
“A guy who can run like that, he doesn’t need to be. We’re not out of his sight, I can tell you that.”
“What if there are other people out there? He could be on the other side of the resort now. We could make a run for it.”
“Let’s hope not,” Jerry said. “I don’t want to think of any other kids getting in his crosshairs. You should check the phones again.”
“I’ve got it,” Bill volunteered. He powered up each of their phones, the verdict the same for each. “No go.”
