The concrete barrier ended. The driver swerved the car across the open median toward the other side of the freeway. The driver, seemingly unfazed, drove down the grassy patch at ninety miles an hour. Cars passed them, honking. The front of their car bounced wildly until the driver—slowing the car down—moved off the grass and swung onto the roadway. He sped up, heading east—toward Timberline.
“No worse than the traffic back home on the 405,” the driver said.
The girl slugged him on the shoulder.
Bell wanted to laugh again, but didn’t. Enough of that, he told himself. “How long has it been going on down there?” Bell asked.
“I don’t know,” the driver said. “Maybe a week.”
“What are the police doing down there?” Bell said.
“Cops disappeared right after it began,” the girl said. “They got a McDonald’s up here? I think I saw one when we passed,” she said.
“Denny’s,” Bell said. He was hungry, too; he hadn’t eaten anything since very early that morning. Despite the world having gone crazy, you still had to eat, he supposed.
“Hey, is it your birthday?” the girl asked him. “If it’s your birthday, maybe we could ask them for the—what do they call it?”
“Grand Slam breakfast,” her boyfriend said.
“It’s free, if it’s your birthday,” the girl said.
Bell realized the two were high, and maybe crazy too.
CHAPTER 16
The men had been brutal, as if they weren’t human at all but black-leather-clad beasts. They had no mercy when she’d pleaded with them to stop what they were doing. They’d finally gone away. She’d fallen asleep, but only because they’d made her take a Valium to keep her from both escaping and sobbing. The sound of her crying bothered them.
Exhausted and filthy, Lacy, in a dream-like state, heard herself speak out loud, finally waking. She heard herself call for her father, as if he might come pick her up off the beer-stinking mattress and carry her out of the cold, tiny bedroom she’d been raped in.
After a horrible moment of consciousness, she knew that she’d been dreaming. She was in that awful house where she’d come to look for her sister. At last she opened her eyes. The sight of the empty room, a chair pushed over on the floor where they’d enjoyed her first, was surreal. She saw her jeans tossed across the room next to her ripped-from-her panties, both muddy and trampled.
She forced herself to sit up. It seemed as if the whole terrible memory of what they’d done to her would go away if she could just get dressed and get to her car.
The bedroom door was shut. She heard nothing from outside in the living room; the house was completely silent.
She got up, naked, and tried to put on the panties but gave up, seeing they’d been torn badly. She slid her jeans on, and then her gray wool sweater she finally found. It had been tossed into a corner and was clean.
She sat back down on the bed and started to cry. The Valium had left her with an overwhelming sense of fatigue. She felt the tears run down her cheek and wiped them with the back of her hand.
It was late afternoon, she guessed—or seemed to be, from the cold, dead light in the room. She checked the pocket of her jeans for her new cell phone and remembered she’d left it in the car with her purse. She stood up again, still feeling weak, and walked across the room. She lifted a sheet that was being used on the window as a curtain.
The snow was falling outside soundlessly. The road, which had been clear when she’d arrived, was white with snow. She put her head down on the cold glass of the window and told herself to get out. She walked to the bedroom door and tried it. It was unlocked.
She realized she had no shoes on and went back to look for them. She remembered being pushed onto the chair and looking up at the three men, all of them high on amphetamines. One of them tipped the chair over, holding her by her foot, her shoe coming off in his hand. She found both her running shoes by the tipped-over chair. She couldn’t look at the chair without feeling sick.
She slipped her shoes on, went back to the door and listened. Not hearing anything, she pulled the door open.
The first thing she saw was a motorcycle stuck in the opposite wall, as if it had been hung like an ornament. The room’s couches and lounge chairs were turned over. A man, the one who’d come to the door and pulled her into the house, was on the floor of the tiny living room, dead, his head twisted grotesquely so that it was turned 180 degrees. His face was above his back.
She heard the front door’s screen door open and turned, startled. A young man with red hair, in a dirty uniform of some kind, stood in the doorway.
“Sorry, I saw you in the window and I—I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think you were one of them,” Lieutenant Bell said.
Lacy looked at the lieutenant. He’d left the stoner couple from L.A. when they stopped at the Denny’s on the road to Timberline, preferring to go it alone. And after he’d watched them rifle two dead bodies for cash, the Chinese girl taking a dead woman’s earrings and putting them on and laughing about it.
He’d found an abandoned mountain bike leaning against the back of the restaurant and ridden it back all the way into Timberline. He’d ridden to the sheriff’s office, expecting to find help, and found that abandoned too. The interior of the office had been wrecked. The bank across the street was mysteriously on fire. And everywhere he walked on Main Street were dozens of dead bodies and abandoned cars. He thought he was the last living soul on the planet until he’d cycled down a random residential street and seen the girl standing inside the house. She was the first human being he’d seen in more than an hour.
“I’m looking for my sister,” Lacy said blankly.
Bell limped into the house. His side was bleeding and he had a bruise on his face. He was wearing some kind of military overalls that were filthy.
“Is she here?” Bell asked.
“I—I don’t know. No. I don’t—I’ve been. I have to call my father,” she said. “Do you have a cell phone?”
“No. Land lines are down,” Bell said. “I’ve been in a few empty houses and there was no dial tone.”
“I need to call my father,” Lacy said again. “Do you have a phone?” She repeated the question as if she hadn’t heard him answer her.
Bell looked at the girl. He saw that something was very wrong with her. She was disheveled—trauma from seeing the killing in the house, he supposed. He didn’t know what to say. Bell glanced around the room. He saw a body part lying on the floor and looked up. The things had been here, it was obvious. The girl had escaped—or come in later—and now she was traumatized. It was understandable.
“I’ve …” Lacy looked at him.
On instinct he walked across the room, took the girl by the hand and led her out the front door to the street. She followed him, not able or not willing to object. He didn’t know whether she saw what he’d seen on the floor: a man’s male organs tossed aside, ripped from his body.
“There’s a house next door. It has a cell phone. No one was there when they came. I think the place is pretty much intact,” Bell said. “Why don’t we go over there and try their phone?”
The girl looked at Bell and nodded. The dog that had been kicked by the man at the door that morning came out from behind a fence across the street, ran across the snowy road and put his head on the toe of Lacy’s running shoe. The dog barked. Lacy bent down and patted the animal carefully, as if she were reconstructing something inside of herself at the same time. She stood up and pushed the hair out of her face.