Run Away (9 page)

Oliver emitted a doggerel groan and pressed his lips forcefully against hers.
Am I drunker than I thought? Am I really giving off signals that I want him?
Kayla tried to pull away, but found the wall to be a mere inch behind her. Her back met the plasterboard. “Get off, man. This isn’t funny.”

“Stop complaining, love.” His tongue was covering an alarming amount of surface area on her neck, leaving a trail of slobber behind it. His stubbled chin was like sandpaper on her pink, sunburnt skin. She put her palms on his shoulders and feebly tried to push him off. His hand found the zip on her denim shorts.

“I’m not fucking kidding, Oliver, get off me,” she snapped, trying not to let her growing fear seep into her voice.

She felt her shorts drop to her ankles, and he pushed painfully against her. She tried not to let panic rise in her throat. Was this really happening? Why hadn’t she told anyone where she was going? That third shot of tequila was making it difficult to think straight. Would anyone hear her if she yelled for help?
Wait, now there’s something else rising in my throat
.

Kayla coughed violently, bile catching at the back of her throat, and vomit sprayed down the back of Oliver’s shirt, sliding down the back of his neck and filling his ear with chunky, acidic puke. He recoiled quickly, his mouth gaping in disbelief. “You vile bitch! Did you just fucking puke on me?”

Kayla wiped her mouth and winked at him. She couldn’t resist. He darted from the room in the direction of the communal toilet, and she hastily locked the bedroom door behind him, pressing her forehead against it and closing her eyes.

Don’t cry
.
Don’t even think
.
Just go to sleep
.

T
HE SUN
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through the curtainless window the next morning, and Kayla peeled one eye opened. Her mouth felt both dry and sticky, coated with a thick layer of sour fuzz, and an invisible fist was clenched around her stomach. She was in her bed, fully clothed, and saw that only half of her roommates had returned—­Bling was nowhere to be seen. Russia was lying facedown in her pillow, her blond hair arranged like a bird’s nest that had fallen from the highest branch of a tall tree. The room was quieter than it had ever been. It was like there was no longer a world outside.

The lingering stench of Oliver’s aftershave on her sheets was enough to rouse Kayla from her bed. Slinging some sandals onto her filthy feet, she opened the door as quietly as she could. She had to find Sam. She had to tell him about Oliver.

She padded down the corridor and knocked on the boys’ door. After a few seconds she heard heavy, uneven footsteps and Ralph’s face emerged through the crack. He rubbed his sleep-­edged eyes and groggily said, “All right, Kayla. How can I help you on this fine morning?”

“Is Sam around?”

Ralph grinned. “Well, you see, the thing is, Sam has company. The sly dog kept us up all night. Lucky bugger.”

“Company?” A girly giggle wafted toward the door. A familiar girly giggle.

Kayla nudged the door wider and saw a tangle of thick black hair spread across Sam’s bare chest. His muscular arm was wrapped around a petite, naked figure.

The girl’s face was buried in his shoulder. But Kayla knew who it was.

It was Bling.

Chapter 15

July 12, England

A
RAN PETERS HADN’T changed at all.

Sitting opposite Kayla, the sunlight illuminated the frizzy top layer of his wiry hair like a halo of fuzz. It was cut close to his scalp in a bid to tame the unruliness, but the effect was barbed wire curls cut off mid-­bounce in a range of directions and lengths. Instead of stereotypical, thick-­rimmed geek glasses, he sported dainty spectacles that perched delicately on his small pointed nose. His skin was the pallid shade of wallpaper paste with roughly the same cratered texture, and his small eyes were a watery blue.

If Kayla didn’t know any better, she’d guess he had some sort of terminal illness. His frame disappeared beneath his two-­sizes-­too-­big jeans, bunched together at the waist with a canvas belt, and a faded superhero T-­shirt that had seen one too many washes.

“I hope you understand that what you’re asking me to do is dodgy.” They were sitting in a window booth in a deserted pub—­Monday lunchtime wasn’t exactly peak drinking time. He slurped his lemonade through a straw, not bothering to lower his voice despite the bartender’s ears pricking up. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy dodgy. I live for dodgy. But I sort of need to know why I’m doing it. My days of wreaking havoc with the country’s technological defenses just for the hell of it are over. I’m much more refined now. More mature.” He winked, taking another gigantic slurp and reaching into his scruffy khaki backpack for his laptop. It was covered in stickers and logos of dubstep bands Kayla had never heard of.

She stifled a scoff. “So you want to know why I’m asking you to do this?” Aran nodded, furiously typing in the third password his system had demanded of him. She wondered what on earth he had hiding on his computer to warrant such rigorous privacy measures. “Surely you heard about what happened?” News in their tiny hometown usually spread pretty quickly.

“Yeah, I did.” He didn’t apologize for her loss or tell her how sad it was. It was a pleasant change—­his social ineptitude was refreshing. “But I still don’t really get why you want me to do it. I thought that was it, case closed, blatant suicide.” Slurp. “So why are you going through all this trouble?”

“I need closure,” Kayla said. She decided to omit the fact that her therapist had told her so. The fewer ­people who considered her a raging lunatic, the easier it’d be to convince them to help. “I need someone to blame.”

Aran nodded, chewing the insides of his cheeks. His already narrow face collapsed into itself, skeletal cheekbones jutting through his skin. “That’s good enough for me. So the game plan is for me to hack into Facebook’s servers and find out who created the profile that sent Gabriel the hate mail?” Kayla nodded. “Easy. Though obviously I won’t be able to find out exactly who made it, just where they did it. I’ll get you an IP address, which should help narrow it down.”

“You reckon you’ll be able to?”

“Yeah, but I dunno how long it’ll take. It’s complicated, but simply hacking into the profile itself won’t be enough. It’d maybe give me the e-­mail address used to create it, but that wouldn’t be much use either, as that’ll probably be a ghost account too. Hang on, let me check.” The clatter of touch-­typing and a few bleeps later, Kayla was amazed that Aran had already found his answer. “Yep, as I suspected the e-­mail address is just a series of letters and numbers.” Aran polished off his drink, the ice cubes chinking against the empty glass, and he looked around to get the waiter’s attention.

“Hang on, you’ve already signed into the account that sent those messages?”

“Yup.”

“Can I . . . can I see?”

Aran sighed. “You sure?” Following Kayla’s swift nod, he clicked off several private browser windows and turned the screen around to face her. She tried to prevent a gasp escaping from her lips, but it was too late.

Daniel Burns. The only messages sent from Daniel Burns’s account were to Gabriel Finch.

It was nauseating to see them again in black and white, stamped with seen times over the course of a few weeks. The first:
Dirty faggot scum
. They progressed rapidly to rape threats, violence threats, death threats. The last one, on March 13, hadn’t been read by its recipient. It simply consisted of two words:
Good riddance
. It felt like she had been kicked in the stomach with a hard-­toed boot. She turned away. “So that account was created with the sole purpose of tormenting my brother?”

“Looks like it. They don’t have a profile picture, or any status updates. It’s unlikely this account was made with the intention of posting every meal the guy consumed with the caption ‘nom nom nom.’ Or, indeed, targeting any other victims. It was made purely to attack Gabriel.”

Kayla sat back in the leather booth, letting her hands drop into her lap. “And we have no way of knowing who made it?”

“No, I didn’t say that. It’s traceable, definitely. It just might take a while.”

V
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Sam’s throat
.
His eyes bulging
.

Kayla tried to dial 999
.
She couldn’t type in the right combination of keys
.
997 #99 989
.
She crushed her phone in her hand, and pain shot through her palm as the shattered glass screen sliced straight through the skin
.
Blood drenched the tiled floor
.

Sam’s face was purple
.
Frozen in a single expression of terror as his frantic gasps slowed and he realized that this was it
.
The end
.

The light behind his eyes was snuffed out, like moist fingers crushing a candle flame
.

The person whose hands were wrapped around Sam’s airwaves turned to face Kayla
.
Their face was blurred
.

She woke up drenched in clammy sweat. Her sheets were sodden, even though she’d left the window open to allow for a draft. Thai-­style humidity had replaced the traditional British summer weather that rarely nudged the thermometer above seventy degrees. Her legs were tangled around the duvet—­she felt like a bear caught in a trap too complex to unravel. Instead of wrestling with the linen and spiking her adrenaline, Kayla willed herself to go back to sleep, and tried to empty her mind of thoughts. She had to see that face.

But it was no use. She wriggled free of the duvet, rolled over and stared at the ceiling, wiping her sticky forehead with the back of her hand. The sweat felt cold.

The recurring nightmare that haunted her dreams every night was the only time she saw anything clearly, right up until the very last second when she inevitably, inescapably, woke up. During the day, she couldn’t shake the mental fuzz—­the fluffy pink candy floss clinging to her thoughts and memories, making them gloopy and impossible to process. But at night the visions were so vivid that she felt more alert than she did when she was actually awake.

She just wished she could stay asleep long enough to unearth what her subconscious was trying to tell her.

The lack of information surrounding Sam’s death infuriated Kayla. Why had the investigation fizzled out so fast? No more questions from the British police. She hadn’t heard a peep from Shepherd in weeks. And nothing had come of the police search in Thailand. They seemed to have all but given up when their initial hunts of the obvious locations presented no new clues.

If the news coverage had been sparse at the beginning, the measly mention his story currently received at the end of the regional news was nothing short of degrading. It seemed absolutely alien to her that a twenty-­year-­old boy could vanish off the face of the earth, under violent circumstances, and nobody would bat an eyelid. If it weren’t for Sam’s mum and her undisguised heartbreak, she might even suspect there had never been a Samuel Kingfisher at all. Her inability to grieve for him certainly suggested so.

And then there was the fact that she couldn’t so much as think about Sam without then thinking of her brother. Her psychological disorientation was causing the grief for the two men she’d lost to merge into one ball of pain. She could no longer emotionally distinguish between the two tragedies. Both came with an identical matching nightmare, and both engulfed her with an uneasiness that wasn’t usually synonymous with normal grief.

Both gave her the niggling feeling that something wasn’t right.

T
HE TENSION AT
Berry Hill was so thick it was almost tangible. Martha Finch had tripled her daily alcohol consumption, and Mark had quadrupled his quota of work-­based stress. He would call Martha to say he would be home a ­couple of hours late from the office—­something had come up. She would pour another drink to pass the time and ease the anger. Mark would dread coming home to a drunk wife, who screamed and yelled and insisted he was having an affair. The next night he’d come home even later, to an even drunker and even angrier Martha.

Even Kayla’s nan seemed to be avoiding her. Yesterday morning Kayla had found herself making porridge while Nan was waiting for a pot of tea to brew. Neither woman had said a word to each other, and Kayla couldn’t put her finger on why. She hadn’t seen Nan for a few days. For an old lady, she had a fairly hectic social calendar, chock full of various coffee dates, garden center visits, and trips to the bingo hall. Usually, Kayla loved that about her nan, and hoped she would have just as much joie de vivre when she hit eighty-­five. But lately she’d found herself getting frustrated when she knocked on Nan’s door for a chat, or to ask if she wanted to go for a walk, and was met with silence. In a selfish way, she wanted everyone else to stop living their lives. She’d maybe feel less quarantined that way.

The boredom of being cooped up in the house all day—­feeling like Rapunzel except with notably shorter hair and absolutely no Prince Charming to rescue her—­had driven Kayla to consider the possibility of flying back out to Southeast Asia. She’d been the only one to fly home following Sam’s disappearance. Dave, understandably, didn’t want to waste his remaining days of mobility back in England when he could be continuing his adventure, and Russia had insisted on keeping him company. Kayla assumed Bling was still out there. At least, she hadn’t heard otherwise. If all had gone according to plan, they’d be in Cambodia around now. Or maybe they’d stayed a little longer in Vietnam, taking time to properly explore, now that they weren’t sticking to a preset schedule. Kayla felt a pang of longing.

Whenever she thought about the last month of the trip, a wave of white hot, self-­directed anger surged through her veins. Sam had been so distant, but if she’d known it’d be the last four weeks she’d ever spend with him, she might have cut him some slack. Just thinking about how they treated each other filled her with self-­hatred. She’d give anything to have those days back. She bit down on her bottom lip until it bled, feeling a strange sort of satisfaction as she dabbed at the cut and watched as the fine creases on the back of her hand filled with ruby red streaks.

After that hungover morning in Sangkhlaburi, she couldn’t help but feel betrayed—­by the ­people around her and by life itself. The feeling that nothing had turned out like it was supposed to clung to her everywhere they went. She’d think of Gabe, for one dreadful second forgetting he was gone, and then painful realization would hit her like a truck. Every time she smelled Oliver’s syrupy aftershave, her stomach turned. Whenever she heard Bling’s laugh or Sam’s deep voice, she saw it all again. The tangle of black hair. The naked chest. The unmistakable smell of sex in the air.

The arm that should have been wrapped around her instead.

The arm that now never would be.