Microsoft word winterb.., p.20
Microsoft Word - Winterborn_final-ADRoland, page 20
Michaela stepped closer to Denise. Generally, the two girls didn't speak, outside of whatever
classes they had together. Michaela was a junior, older than the other three. Taylor, her younger
brother, begged her to drive him and his friends.
If I’d only known that meant these two sacks of trailer-trash.
“I don't like this,” she said softly to Denise. She didn't like Denise. Not many people did. Rude,
loud-mouthed, and contrary to everything, her reaction to the gun surprised Michaela enough to lend
her a little bit of empathy.
Denise nodded. For a second, Michaela saw something like fear in the other girl's eyes. “Lewis is
absolutely the last person that needs to be handling a gun. And definitely not 'teaching' some kid a
lesson.”
“Taylor has impulse control issues. I should never have agreed to bring you three out here.”
Denise just shrugged. “We would have found some other way here.”
Lewis stood up and bounced on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter. “All right, it's ten o'clock.
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The kid said he would be here by ten thirty. We're supposed to meet him in the thing between all
the buildings.”
“The what?”
“That big glass building with all the plants.”
“I think it's called an atrium,” Michaela added. “And it's probably really dangerous. We shouldn't
be messing around here. This place is being renovated. Who knows what's lying around here?” The
two boys blew out their candles.
She looked toward Denise for support, but despite her reservations, the other girl blew out her
candle and followed the boys out the door. Without light, the room felt too open. A sense of
vulnerability crept into her limbs. If something were to happen, it would happen in the dark, where
she couldn't see it coming for her.
I can walk away from this, Michaela thought . I don't have to stay. Taylor would probably like it if I left.
But if something happened to her kid brother, then her parents would never forgive her.
“Taylor, wait.” She hurried out into the empty, dark hallway.
“Guys? Where are you?”
They had the flashlights. Groaning to herself, she stepped back into the room and tried to trace
her path back to the pile of plastic where Lewis sat earlier. In the blackness, the room had eyes that
watched, waited. Michaela shivered, regretting reading all those Stephen King novels in the school
library. She walked until she kicked the crinkling edge of the pile of plastic. Bending over, she felt
around for the tapered emergency candles and matches Lewis brought in with them.
She couldn't find them. Sighing, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and flipped the screen
up. The light lit up the carpet right in front of her, but not much else. She straightened up, holding the phone up.
“Oh, crap!” She dropped the phone. It bounced off her foot and clunked away in the darkness.
In the brief flash of light, she caught a glimpse of a little kid. A little boy, holding a ball.
“Hello?” she whispered. No way there’s a kid that young in here. I saw a shadow or something.
She heard a sound. Any kid would know the sound of a rubber ball bouncing on carpet.
“Shh.”
Michaela twitched, adrenaline rocketing through her body. “Oh God,” she whimpered. “Who’s in
here?”
Hands touched her stomach, cold against the sliver of skin between her pants and her T-shirt. She
cried out and stumbled away. Her foot connected with her phone, and she swooped down to pick it
up.
The bluish screen lit up only a small area right in front of her.
No kid. She raised the light and waved it back and forth, trying to see into the dark corners.
Another awful jolt of endorphins jolted her system.
The room wasn't the one they were in before. This one didn't have the hanging plastic or the piles
of materials. No hardhats, no forgotten coolers.
Lewis found beer in one of them. She tasted it in the back of her throat.
Furniture, just furniture, and heavy drapes over the windows. Big rugs on the floor.
She clamped the phone closed, extinguishing the faint light. A second later she opened it again.
The pile of plastic lay at her feet, and the moon shone very faintly through the dusty lengths
hanging over the windows. She took a step and tripped. The phone flew from her hand.
“I imagined that,” she told herself. How would she know the details of the room, like the drapes
and the rugs? The cell phone hadn't given off that much light. Hearing her own voice made everything
surreal. The irrational urge to find a corner of the room and just sit there until daylight was almost too strong to resist.
A few deep breaths helped calm her down. She dropped to her knees and felt around for the
phone.
“What the heck? Come on!” On her hands and knees now, she crawled toward where she thought
the phone landed. “Where is it?”
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Behind her, something hissed across the floor, something hard and smooth.
It's going to get me!
Faint light flicked on, behind her. The phone!
Michaela turned around, looking. There it was, just a few feet in the opposite direction. She
crawled over and reached out for it.
Feet stepped out of the shadows, between her and the phone. The tips of her fingers brushed the
slick surface of patent leather. Cold, wet. Bits of grass stuck to her fingertips.
Denise wore flip-flops. Lewis and Taylor wore sneakers.
A startled scream started in her throat.
Little hands clamped over her mouth. “Shh!”
Fear made it hard to breathe. That surreal feeling intensified.
“Shh,” the child hissed into her ear. “Shut up, before she hears you, too.” The words puzzled her
enough, even through her fear, to shut her up.
“Go hide. Be very still.”
The hand slipped away from her mouth. In the faint beams of moonlight stood a girl just a year or
so younger than herself. Michaela watched the lights shimmer through the girl’s lean body.
“Who are you?”
“Do as I say, if you want to make it through tonight.”
She thought about Taylor, and all he had survived. She was more terrified of something
happening to him. She turned toward the door. “My brother is out there.”
“I'll do what I can.” The girl kicked and something bumped Michaela’s shoe.
Her cell phone. In her fumbling to hold on to it, she flipped open the screen.
The girl pointed to the far corner. “Hide! No matter what, just stay still and stay quiet. ”
She slipped into the shadows, disappearing from sight. Michaela caught her breath.
The lack of sound rang in her ears like a gong. Michaela's head still spun from the freaky turn of
events and the sickening fear eating through her resolve.
Who were the children in the house? Did the caretaker have more kids than the crazy one? If he
did, they didn’t ride the bus. Michaela didn’t recognize the girl, and she was definitely old enough to
be in high school.
Something slammed against the other side of the wall. Michaela bit back a cry of alarm. Thumps
filtered through the wall. She heard a low moan, muffled by the structure.
Sounded like someone was in pain.
Should she see who it was? What if it was Taylor?
The girl had told her to stay put. Stay quiet.
The door opened. Michaela shoved herself as deeply into the corner as she could. The door
blocked her view of whoever stood there. A solid shape moved through the darkness and hit the floor
with a muffled thump. A second later, the door shut again.
Michaela pressed her ear against the wall. Silence.
She opened her phone and shone the light toward the vague dark sharp huddled on the floor.
Sticking close to the wall, she crawled closer, keeping the light aimed ahead of her. A few feet away,
the figure began to take shape. A head, shoulders, hips, one bare foot. Flip-flops, one lying on the floor by the door, the other missing completely.
“Denise?” she whispered, edging forward. “Denise?”
She poked the other girl in the shoulder. No response. After a second, Denise shuddered violently
and rolled on to her back, slinging her arm up and nearly smacking Michaela in the face. She grabbed
the flailing arm, but the wet and sticky limb slipped out of her grasp. Denise made horrible, wet,
choking sounds as her body arched off the floor.
Warm droplets splattered Michaela's face. She backed up, biting her bottom lip.
From outside the closed door, she heard another sound. Terrified, she ran for her corner just as
something heavy slammed into the closed door. Denise still struggled and writhed against the carpet,
gasping, retching, and choking. In the glare of her cell phone screen, Michaela saw a huge pile of
plastic tarps in the corner opposite hers. She ran as fast as she could and dove behind it.
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Whatever was outside really, really wanted in. It continued to slam against the door, over and
over again, until wood cracked. Heavy and thick, like all the other doors, but Michaela bet anything it
wouldn't withstand such an assault for much longer.
The sheer vulnerability of not being able to see in the dark left her even more scared, more
miserable. She pulled plastic over her body, hoping she was completely concealed.
A vicious, selfish thought slipped into her head. Denise lay right in front of the door. It would get
her first.
The door splintered with the sticky crack of old wood breaking. Michaela forced aside the abject
terror that threatened to consume her and took tiny, shallow breaths, terrified of making the plastic
rustle.
Whatever entered the room sounded like an elephant suffering from some lung ailment. Phlegmy
breaths that hooted through a massive chest cavity filled the room. Even through the barriers of
plastic, Michaela could smell it, a damp, fetid stench of dirt and roadkill and fungus. It snorted, a blast of sick sound that nearly made her give away her hiding place by moaning aloud.
Denise reacted, crying out. The monster snorted again, something that almost sounded like a
word. Michaela squeezed her eyes shut.
Denise screamed, a sound full of agony. Terror. Pain.
Pain. The utterance put every horror movie scream to shame. Michaela bit back her own howl.
After an eternity, Denise’s screams ceased. Rapid slurping took their place.
Michaela kept her eyes closed and her breathing shallow. She took her mind away, somewhere
nice and fun and warm. The lakeside campground their parents took her and Taylor to every year.
There was a gazebo and a swing that hung from an oak tree that was nearly three hundred years old.
The swing would go way out over the lake and they'd drop like stone to the bottom, where the slimy,
sticky weeds would brush their bare legs and arms and tangle in their hair.
At some point, lack of oxygen took its toll and she drifted into unconsciousness.
****
She woke up to sun shining in the window, alone. The plastic covered most of her face, allowing
just the faintest breath of cool, fresh air in. Head aching, body aching, she fought off the plastic and got to her feet. Her cell phone fell out of the folds of plastic. She picked it up and flicked it open.
Dead battery. She muttered a curse word and took a step forward. The crackle of thick plastic
jarred her memory, and she suddenly remembered why she lay wrapped in plastic in a strange room.
Why her bottom lip hurt so badly, and why remnants of terror began to surface.
Wrapping her arms around herself, she sank to her knees. Taylor, Taylor, where was Taylor? Was
he hurt? Dead? Had that...thing gotten him?
Michaela forced back all her frantic questions and took a few deep breaths. If she panicked, she
wouldn’t do anyone any good. She looked up, slowly.
Only a dark stain on the floor marked where Denise had collapsed the night before. The dark
stain and long strands of dark brown hair.
Sick to her stomach, Michaela opened the door. The Estate was silent.
She left the room and headed downstairs. Lewis said they would meet the kid in the atrium. It
took a few tries, a few wrong turns down the long, maze-like corridors, before she found a big pair of
doors at the end of a hallway. She peered through the panes, squinting to see through the smudged,
wavy glass.
She made out a lot of dead trees, antique metal furniture, and lots of long, hanging vines vibrant
with green leaves and brilliant flowers.
And discarded beneath one of the rusted metal chairs, lay Taylor's hat. Without thinking, she
thrust open the glass doors and ran into the glass-walled structure. She grabbed the hat and turned it
around in her hands. Black beanie with some skateboard logo emblazoned on the front.
Taylor's, all right.
Clods of dirt fell out when she turned it over.
Dirt?
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She paced forward, following her instincts. A few feet down what was left of a cobblestone
walkway, she found Denise's other flip-flop. Farther, something that looked like it might have been
part of a green T-shirt. Who wore the green shirt? Lewis or Taylor?
She couldn't remember. She couldn't recall anything about her brother, other than he wore the
black knit beanie and skater shoes that were ridiculously thick and puffy.
It's the style, sis.
Looks like you're wearing marshmallows on your feet!
She closed her eyes on the conversation and kept going. She pushed aside a thick vine. A shower
of vegetative debris fell on her head and shoulders. Something else fell from the trees overhead,
something different than the leaves and small sticks.
It bounced off her shoulder and rolled to the path. She froze, holding back all the crazy memories
of Taylor as a kid, before his brain surgery, when he was quiet and shy and then afterwards, when
nobody could get him to shut up, and he had to be supervised constantly so that his lack of impulse
control didn't get him killed.
She didn't think about the time he made her Play-Dough flowers for her birthday. Or when he
burned all her Barbies in the grill. When he finally learned how to read, a skill that his brain cancer
nearly robbed him of.
She didn't think about the fact that he had survived a brain tumor that three out of four doctors
said would kill him by his fourth birthday.
Up ahead, the path was blocked by a thick stand of half-dead shrubbery. She reached out to clear
a path through it.
The girl from the room stepped in front of her, out of nowhere. In the filtered sunlight, she looked
so pale. Her eyes, big, black orbs, stared into Michaela’s soul.
She shuddered and squeezed her brother’s hat.
The girl said, “Don't go over there.”
“Is my brother there?” Michaela fought back tears, stepping from foot to foot.
“Go home,” the girl urged. “Take comfort in the fact that your brother was dead before she found
him.”
All the breath, blood, and warmth seemed to flee Michaela's body. “Taylor...”
The world wobbled and she found herself on her knees, slouched over, gasping for breath.
“Taylor. Taylor.”
The girl knelt next to her, so graceful. Michaela stared at her, going numb, starting at her
fingertips. “Did you kill my brother?”
“No. You need to leave now. Go home.”
“I can't. Not without Taylor.”
The girl tucked Michaela’s hair behind her ears with cold fingers. “Go home. She will come back,
and she will drain every drop of blood from your body, and then feed what's left of you to her pets. Do
you care anything about your own well-being?”
“Taylor,” she moaned.
“If I bring you his head, will you leave?”
She stared at her in shock, horrified, wondering if she was joking. “What?”
“That’s how she told me my brother was dead. She gave me his head.” The girl’s somber
expression twisted into a horrible grin that stretched from ear to ear, tearing flesh. Her eyes widened
and black spread through the white-like ink.
Michaela pushed herself to her feet and stumbled away. She fled the Estate, screaming.
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Chapter Sixteen
“Sean, the police are here.”
Tam's words sounded garbled, distant. Sean waved her off and rolled over, pressing his face
deeper into his pillow. Saturday, his only day to sleep late, and Tam babbled right in his ear about—
“Police?” He sat straight up, his head still gauzy and full of dreams. “What? Something with
Mike?”
“No. Some kids went into the Estate last night and something happened.”
Sean yanked on a pair of jeans and brushed his teeth just enough to get rid of the funky taste in
the back of his throat. He stumbled down the stairs, still stuck partly in his own head. Tam met him at
the foot of the stairs with a water bottle. He gulped half of it then winced when his stomach protested.
