The Burning Man (18 page)

“Still,” she said. “It beats school, right?”

“Are you in Mrs. Himmel’s homeroom?” he asked.

“Um... yeah,” she said. “How about you?”

“Mr. Ulster,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Rachel,” she said. “You?”

“Andy Metzger,” he said. “Mindy is my sister.”

He said that like it was supposed to mean something, like everybody knew Mindy Metzger.

“Oh, right,” Olivia said, nodding. “Sure.”

She risked a peek around Andy’s bulky shoulder and saw that the security guy was less than ten feet away, scanning the crowd of kids.

Her heart skittered against her ribs and she ducked down like she needed to tie her shoe, waiting for his gaze to pass over them like a searchlight.

When she popped her head back up, she saw that the security guy was headed for the door. She swiftly duck-walked to catch up with her new pal Andy, keeping her head low.

“This way,” a male chaperone said, gesturing toward one of two waiting buses.

Olivia impulsively turned toward the one indicated by the male chaperone, figuring he obviously wasn’t Mrs. Himmel and so it would be less awkward if he didn’t recognize her.

“Come on,” she said to Andy, hooking her arm through his and leading him toward the bus she had chosen. “We can sit together.”

He looked at her with naked incredulity.

“Hurry,” she said. “We don’t want to get stuck sitting next to the toilet!”

She boarded the bus, waving casually at the chaperone and the driver.

She nearly had a heart attack when the chaperone called after her.

“Hey,” he said. “Who are you with?”

But to her amazement, her new pal in the wrestling T-shirt came to her rescue.

“She’s with Mrs. Himmel,” he said. “But she can ride with us, right?”

The chaperone eyed Olivia with suspicion for a moment, but then seemed to relent and waved her on.

“Here,” she said to Andy, choosing a window seat about halfway back. “You’re pretty tall, I bet you want the aisle seat.”

“Thanks for saying ‘tall’ and not ‘fat,’” he said with a self-deprecating grin. “But yeah, the aisle is better.”

As the bus pulled out of the station, she saw the security guy standing on a street corner, talking into a cellular phone. She tucked her chin down and turned away from the window, covering her face with her hand.

“Paparazzi?” Andy asked with an arched eyebrow.

Olivia smiled and shrugged.

“You aren’t in Mrs. Himmel’s class are you?” he asked. When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.”

“Busted,” Olivia said, hands up in surrender. “I’m just broke, and trying to score a free ride to Jacksonville. My little sister’s gotten herself into some trouble, and needs my help.”

“What kind of trouble?” Andy asked.

Olivia shrugged and looked away, out the window.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful.

“That’s okay,” he said.

They were both silent for a few minutes as the bus got onto the highway and headed out of town.

“I knew you weren’t from Sawbridge,” Andy said eventually, half to himself. “No girl from Sawbridge would be caught dead sitting next to me.”

“Eat something,” Tony said, nudging the bag of Butchie Burgers along the bench seat of the ’65 Olds they were currently driving. It was an ugly ride, and drank up gas like it was happy hour, but the damn thing was solid as a tank and had plenty of room to stretch out. The late owner had probably bought it new the year it came out.

Tony had left the old fart to bleed out in a rest stop toilet off Interstate 95.

Rachel cringed away from the food like it was a bag of snakes, turning her face toward the dark window.

“You gotta eat, or your sister’s gonna be all pissed off,” he said. “She’ll think I’m mistreating you.”

“You are mistreating me,” she said without turning to face him. Her voice was a dull monotone, emotionless and shut down.

“Honey,” he said, “when I start mistreating you, you’ll know it.”

She didn’t respond. He shrugged and turned on the radio. He twisted the dial until he found a bubbly pop song with a female singer.

“There,” he said. “I bet you like this, huh?”

Still no response.

“So what kind of music do you like then?” he asked. “New wave? Heavy metal?”

“No!” she said, her teenage contempt finally overruling her sullen silence. “God, wake up and smell the ’90s.”

“I knew that would get you talking,” he said with a grin. “Tell you what, why don’t you pick a radio station for us to listen to?”

“Forget it,” she said, wrapping her arms around her body.

He lashed out at her with his prosthetic arm, cracking it across her mouth and splitting her lip. She squealed and covered her face with both hands, tears welling up in her eyes as she jammed herself against the passenger door in an attempt to get as far away from him as possible.

“I said
pick a radio station
,” he said.

She reached a shaking, bloody hand toward the radio dial. She turned it to the very next station, a fire and brimstone religious station, and then pressed herself back against the door.

“This is what you want to listen to?” he asked, smirking and shaking his head.

She nodded.

“’Cause I’m not gonna change it until we get to Jacksonville.”

She didn’t respond.

He shrugged and turned the volume up.

“Okay,” he said. “Your wish is my command.”

In a weird way, her choice was perfect. The preacher on the radio was female, with the warm, honeyed voice of a phone sex operator, and all this talk about hell and the devil just reinforced his commitment to destiny. He could feel Olivia’s heat echoing inside him, knowing she was out there on the road somewhere, moving toward the place where they met, just like he was.

They were like two celestial bodies about to cross orbits and achieve an auspicious, once in a lifetime conjunction. If he failed, the demon Olivia would mature into an unstoppable monster and the world would be destroyed in a fiery Armageddon not unlike the one being lovingly described by the sexy preacher on the radio.

Tony felt better than he had in months, calm and centered and ready. He felt righteous.

* * *

When the bus made a stop in Jacksonville to refuel, and let the kids stretch their legs and load up on junk food, Olivia bid farewell to Andy. He looked sorry to see her go, but seemed happy to have had an unexpected adventure, however vicarious.

After a quick visit to the ladies’ room, she found it easy to lose herself in the crowd of tourists and families—those chaperones weren’t very good at their jobs, she noted.

She kept her eyes open for the security guy she’d seen in Raleigh while letting the tide of people carry her away from the school kids and out through the main doors.

There was a line for taxis, and she didn’t want to wait so she hopped a city bus that she knew would drop her off close enough to the old house that she could walk the rest of the way.

Sitting there in the back right window seat of the grungy bus, she thought about what she was walking into, and the full weight of it started to hit her. She wished for the thousandth time that she had some ace up her sleeve, some brilliant plan that would guarantee Rachel’s safety and bring her abductor to justice. All she had, however, was this mounting sense of desperation.

She scanned the faces of her fellow riders, wondering if any of them could sense her fear, but they all seemed preoccupied with their own troubles.

That’s when she had a sudden strange flash, a vivid vision like a double exposure over her view of the bus. She saw a grubby, bearded man—homeless, judging by the look of his stained clothes and questionable grooming habits. His skin was a muddy, grayish brown that could have been due to genetics, exposure to the sun, layers of dirt, or all of the above.

He had a mostly bald head, with a fringe of wispy white hair around the edge and a woman’s cheap clip-on earring on one ear, like a pirate. His toothless mouth was open in a silent scream as blood poured from a deep slit in his throat.

She must have let out a not-so-silent scream herself, because everyone on the bus turned back to look at her. Just as quickly, they lost interest—as if screaming nut cases were a regular occurrence on the Jacksonville public transit system.

Olivia shuddered and sank back into the seat, wondering what had gotten into her. It was bad enough that she was having murderous nightmares in her sleep. But having them while she was awake—that was a whole other thing. Something infinitely more troubling.

But she pushed the thoughts to the back of her mind. She got off the bus a stop earlier than she had intended, just to give herself time to walk off the ugly vision and clear her spinning head.

She had to keep it together. She had Rachel to think of.

* * *

Tony stood over the body of the homeless man he’d found squatting in Olivia’s house. He was still reeling from the demon girl’s sudden active intrusion into his brain. She’d been there in the background, of course, the way she always was, smoldering like a nest of banked coals. Then, out of nowhere, she’d flared up and eclipsed his perception with her own, making him doubt his own identity for a vertiginous moment.

If the blade hadn’t been bolted to his prosthetic arm, he would have dropped it.

He pressed his good hand to his temple and took a crooked, stagger-step back from the body. When he turned back to Rachel, she was gone, and the front door was swinging shut.

He swore and took off after the little bitch. How could he have let this happen? Clearly, he’d allowed himself to become complacent with her whipped puppy routine, thinking that she was too scared to try anything.

When he got out to the street, he spotted her desperately banging her little fists on the door of the house next door. A young black woman with lots of long, thin braids twisted together into a fat one was opening the door just as Tony came barreling up the porch steps.

He grabbed Rachel by the hair and shoved her in, knocking the frightened woman backward and stepping into the house, slamming the door behind him.

The woman was crawling away from Tony, and Rachel was cowering off to the right beside a playpen that held a silent, owl-eyed toddler in a pink T-shirt and a diaper.

Tony leapt on top of the woman, covered her mouth with his good hand and stabbed her repeatedly in the chest and neck until she stopped moving.

When he was done dealing with her, he sucked in a long, deep breath to center himself, taking in the surroundings and situation that Rachel had put him in.

The interior of the house was laid out very much like Olivia’s. The front door opened into a large living room, and the kitchen was visible through an archway to the left.

The living room was cheaply but thoughtfully furnished and decorated with family photographs and a few unframed abstract oil paintings that showed some potential, but were still a little bit rough and immature. It was clean and tidy with a warm Christmassy smell of scented candles.

There was a scatter of textbooks and handwritten notes on the low coffee table, and an easel in one corner with a half-completed canvas that looked like it was shaping up to be a real quantum leap in skill, compared to the other ones. Too bad it would never be completed.

Surprisingly, the toddler wasn’t crying. She just sucked her little brown fist and stared at Tony in that creepy way that he hated.

He shuddered and turned to Rachel. Time for an important life lesson.

He gripped her hair and dragged her over to the corpse, thrusting her face down until it was inches from the dead woman’s agonized rictus.

“Do you see what you did?” Tony asked.

Rachel tried to twist her face away, but he pressed the knife against her neck and made her turn back.

“Take a real good look at what you did,” he said.

She was shaking and sobbing, almost silently.

“You killed this nice lady,” he said. “It’s your fault that she’s dead now. Your selfishness means that she’ll never get her degree or finish that painting, and that little girl gets to grow up without a mommy.

“I hope you’re happy.”

Tony threw Rachel toward the playpen. The girl fell awkwardly on her side and just lay there shivering.

“Pick up your baby,” he said.

She looked up at him with a baffled expression, and so he kicked her in the stomach.

“I said. Pick. Up. Your.
Baby.”

Rachel hunched her back, a small dribble of bile leaking from her mouth as she clutched her stomach, but she struggled to her feet and picked up the eerily silent toddler. She wrapped her arms around the little girl, turning to place her own body between Tony and the child.

“You killed her mommy,” Tony said. “So she’s your baby now. If you try anything stupid, like that little stunt you just pulled, I can’t be responsible for what might happen to her. Or you. Now let’s go. We have to be ready when your sister shows up.”

Olivia was saddened but not surprised to discover that the old neighborhood had really gone downhill. It had never been all that nice back when she lived there, but at least the houses were all occupied by ordinary, working class families.

Now, more than half of them were vacant. Some seemed to be optimistically for sale, and others were simply boarded up and abandoned. Her old house was one of the latter.

At some point after the fire, it had been haphazardly rebuilt and painted a weird mint green. Someone had been parking a car on the front lawn, leaving behind a rectangular dead patch of oily dirt and a set of deep tire tracks. But some things remained exactly as she remembered them.

The rickety porch where Randall used to sit and drink. That wonky third step that had never been fixed, and you had to skip over it on your way up to the front door or you were likely to fall through the rotten wood. The now-broken window of her old bedroom on the second floor, the one that she had shared with Rachel. She used to look out that window at the cars passing on the street below, and fantasize about hitching a ride out of that place forever.