The Hunter Inside (38 page)

It was impossible. How would she be able
to get to them on the third floor if she couldn’t even stand? How would she
deflect the wrath of Shimasou away from the children? If her charge to the
building had been foolish rather than heroic and Shimasou snuffed out her flame
of life as easily as it had erased her parents, then she would only be making
her children’s lives worse, and she knew those lives would not have long to run
if she failed.

She reached the arched doorway and
used both hands to draw herself up into a standing position. She looked inside
the building, leaning against the curve of the arch and shielding her ears from
the roar of the wind, which thundered around the building and off the walls.
Inside was practically black. The glow of the moon through the clouds did not
cast much light into the building, and Sandy tripped and fell a second time as
she stepped across the threshold without noticing the six-inch concrete step,
sending fresh pain through her knee and up her thigh. Now she was part of the
thundering world inside the building. The wind rattled and swayed her, biting
at her like a pack of hungry hyenas bringing down its prey.

She got to her feet once more. The
wind screamed angrily at her, furious that it had not gotten what it wanted.
She fought against it, suppressing an urge to scream back at the wind in the
same way as she fought against the voice in her head that she knew was not hers
and that taunted her with whispers of
They’re already gone. They’re already
gone. You’re too late. You’re too late. They’re already gone.

Sandy’s head whirled as she tilted it
back and looked up at the roof. It swayed back and forth, up and down. Her eyes
adjusted and she squinted at the ledge. Still pitch black. She could not see
any shadows; she could not hear any movement.

Just the wind rattling and screaming
around her and the voice inside her head whispering to her that she was too
late.
Too late
.

Droplets of rain continued to fall
through the hole in the roof and hit Sandy’s upturned face, driven and swirled
around by the wind and attacking her from every angle.

I’ve got to get to them
, she thought.
It’s
not
too late.
It’s
not.

She walked across the floor, looking
hard to prevent herself from falling over anything, and shielding her eyes from
the newspaper scraps that dashed and hurried all around her, turned into
missiles by the ferocious wind.

She knew there were to be no more
letters. Tonight would decide that once and for all. One way or the other.

She reached the far wall of the
building and again looked up. Above her were stairs, hanging by a thread it
seemed. Without extending her arms (she knew she couldn’t reach as there was
maybe eleven foot between her and the ragged stairs), Sandy again squinted and
looked around for something she could stand on. In the corner she saw a rusted
filing cabinet, four feet high, and checked that it was empty before dragging
it into position underneath the stairs and clambering on top of it, ignoring
the dull throb of her injured knee.

The wind was less strong near the
walls, and Sandy reached upwards, resisting it as it bit at her ankles. With
the help of the filing cabinet, she grasped the splintered edges of the wooden
stairs and began to pull, unsure if it would hold her weight.

Inside her head, the voice continued
to whisper.

‘Come on then, let’s get
moving,’ Todd Mayhew said with detectable anxiousness in his voice. ‘Where’s
the car?’

‘It’s just at the end of the block,’
O’Neill replied.

‘The block?’

‘Yeah, the block of rooms.’

‘Oh, right. Well, what are we waiting
for?’ The old man’s sentiments were backed up in the actions of the restless
Joe Myers, who stood next to Mayhew and carried on skipping about like he
couldn’t hold it much longer. He
really
had to go.

They were all ready. Except for Bill
Arnold. A strong sense of foreboding had manifested itself inside his mind and
he questioned whether this was what he really wanted to do. A harassing voice
that sounded a lot like his own whispered continuously within the confines of
his head, warning him against following Sandy to wherever it was that she had
gone. The other three men looked at him with fixed stares and he reluctantly
stood, following them out into the storm, dragging his feet along and feeling
like he were wearing diver’s boots
.

Is that my own voice?
he thought. He had
reckoned he would be ready to stop running and fight, but now that it came
right down to fight and die or do nothing and die, he had mixed feelings. He
didn’t know why the voice inside his head kept murmuring warnings, but the more
it spoke; the more he listened, getting into Joe Myers’ Suzuki feeling
doubtful, and only as a means of getting out of the storm.

He had to get out of the storm.

With the doors of the vehicle closed,
the storm was held at bay. O’Neill took the driver’s seat; figuring that Joe
Myers probably wouldn’t be able to remember the way due to the shock he had
been in during the journey to the motel. He had left the keys in the ignition
of the vehicle and had gotten away with it. Maybe in Brooklyn he wouldn’t have
been so lucky.

All four men remained silent as
O’Neill started the engine and pulled away from the motel. The jeep’s wipers
moved rhythmically back and forth as he drove, the force of the rain ensuring
that the window remained hazy, even when Joe Myers reached across from his position
next to O’Neill and flicked a switch that made the wipers go at supersonic
speed.

O’Neill drove slower than he would
have liked, fearing that the wind might flip the jeep over or up on its side.

Mayhew feared the same. He looked
anxiously over the shoulder of O’Neill, feeling nothing in his stomach as they
hit bumps in the road but a hole that was without gravity. He seemed to be
forever looking for Sandy Myers, and he knew this time they would
have
to find her. He also had a feeling that this time they would. But if they
didn’t…

Bill Arnold looked at his hands.
Rough, like construction worker’s hands. They looked like somebody else’s
hands. Something was happening inside his head, and he tried to snap out of the
tunnel vision in which he found himself. His mind tried to drift away to
somewhere that was not Atlantic Beach, or so it seemed, as he wrestled to keep
his eyes from shutting.

One moment he was with the others
inside the Suzuki, the next he was standing outside a crumbling building, and could
feel the rain penetrating through his skin, acid-like in the pain it caused. It
was this pain that helped him snap out of what Mayhew thought was an exhausted
slumber, and by the time they pulled up next to the phone booth he was fully
alert.

‘You walked all this way through the
storm?’ Mayhew asked O’Neill. He was incredulous and O’Neill again felt
exposed.

As though he were somehow wrong. But
what else could he have done? If he hadn’t then he would not have found Joe
Myers. But then Sandy would be with them. The possibilities tortured his mind,
the fact of one canceling out the other giving him no comfort, and he got out
of the Suzuki. The other three men did likewise, Mayhew and Myers at the same
instant, Arnold half a second later, holding on to each other as they made it
to the booth and crammed themselves inside.

‘Wait,’ O’Neill said, as the combined
weight of the other three men crushed the air out of his lungs. ‘I need to
look, and I can’t do that with you three on top of me.’

‘Well, I’m going back to the car,’
Mayhew said, and stepped back out into the storm.

‘I think I’ll join you,’ Bill Arnold
said, as he too moved out of the booth and into the storm. Both men held on to
each other’s arms as they hurried back to the vehicle and jumped inside.

Joe Myers remained, anxious to know
any and every detail concerning his family. He watched as O’Neill searched,
first looking around the phone itself, and then scrabbling down on the floor,
forcing Joe to step backwards and into an instant soaking.

The paper wasn’t there. That much was
obvious to Joe, even if the cop continued to grope around, searching almost
blindly due to the weak light that was cast by the small bulb behind the
synthetic panel. But what did that mean? What did it mean for his family?

O’Neill straightened and looked at the
expectant face of Joe Myers, who was unable to see O’Neill’s face due to his
back being towards the light. Through the shadow that obscured Joe’s face,
O’Neill saw tension. He glanced across at the two men in the Suzuki. Mayhew had
started the engine and it hummed, a backdrop harmonizing with the whipping roar
of the wind. He looked back at Joe Myers. ‘It’s gone, Joe. I’m sorry.’ He
raised a hand to his forehead and wiped away droplets of rain.

‘So, what now?’ Joe asked. He needed
hope. He was not yet ready to give up. Maybe the cop was, but he wasn’t. There
must be other ways, and they had to find them. For Joe Myers, there could only
be one way for this thing to finish.

‘I don’t know, Joe,’ O’Neill said, and
turned in the direction of the idling vehicle after hearing the horn sound.
Mayhew shrugged his shoulders at O’Neill in a what’s-going-on fashion. O’Neill
turned back without returning the gesture.

‘What about Melissa? Do you think she
might have any idea where Sandy could be?’

‘If there’s no other way then we’ll
have to try. When I saw her she seemed to know less than me, but…’ He trailed
off, unsure of how to finish his sentence.
What can Melissa tell us?
He
thought.
She isn’t even a part of all this, not really
. He felt in his
pocket and withdrew a handful of change before offering it to O’Neill.

O’Neill felt in his own pocket for the
paper with Melissa Dahlia’s name and phone number, relieved to locate it
straight away and withdrawing it before picking up the receiver and taking some
of the change that Joe offered. He dialed the number carefully, watching Joe as
he listened to Melissa’s phone ringing at the other end of the line.

‘Hello.’ Melissa Dahlia sounded weary
and anxious to the Special Agent. Her greeting had been said more as a question
than a way of answering the telephone, and O’Neill wasted no time.

‘Melissa, this is Special Agent
O’Neill. I’m with Joe Myers. We’re worried about Sandy and we need to know
where she might be. Do you have any idea, for any reason, of where she could
have gone or been taken by somebody? Any reason at all?’

Melissa paused and thought for more
than a moment. She had questions of her own, and she was pretty sure that once
she told the Special Agent that she had absolutely no idea where Sandy could be
he would hang up the phone and she would be unable to ask her questions. But by
the tone in his voice and the urgency of the way he asked a question containing
almost half a dozen questions, she knew that his were probably more urgent than
her own.

‘I…don’t…know,’ she said, dragging her
words out as she continued to rack her brains for any clue she may have missed.

‘Please, Melissa, think,’ O’Neill
said. He had nearly reached the dead-end that he dreaded so much, and if that
were the case, then it was not just the man in front of him whose family had
been condemned. It might be him and everyone else with him. It probably
would
be.

‘I don’t know. Are you in Atlantic
Beach?’

‘Yeah, that’s right, Atlantic Beach,’
O’Neill replied.

There was silence on the other end of
the line, as Melissa Dahlia struggled to think where Sandy could be.

‘I…I’m sorry Special Agent, but I have
no idea.’

O’Neill detected from her voice that
she was about to cry, but he did not have time to counsel her. They would have
to think of something else.

‘Okay. I’ve gotta go,
Melissa. Sorry,’ O’Neill said and hung up. The less Melissa knew, the better.
If she
never
had to know, then better for everyone. But taking the time
now to try and explain it to her would probably mean that she, and everybody
else,
would
have to know. For the sake of one curious mind, O’Neill was
not willing to risk the sanity and existence of the minds of the rest of the
world.

They still had plenty to do, and
figuring out how to find Sandy was the first step to saving, ultimately,
Melissa’s life.

And the storm was growing.

‘Come on, Joe,’ O’Neill said. He
grabbed Joe’s arm and ran, head down, towards the Suzuki that sat waiting for
them. Myers followed, exhausted in the face of the storm. Wind whipped around
his head, and faint whisperings, like children’s voices, mixed into the wind
with a haunting quality that made him grab hold of O’Neill’s arm as though his
own hand was the jaw of a vice.

Within seconds they arrived at the
vehicle and scrambled inside. Both men wheezed, and O’Neill rubbed his arm
where Myers had gripped him. He would have a bruise there tomorrow – if
tomorrow ever came. Myers could well have broken a bone; such was the force of
his grip.

‘What happened?’ Mayhew asked.