This was not good.
CHAPTER 48
It happened again as the crazy bastard with the knife—Cait couldn’t bring herself to think of him as her brother no matter how hard she tried—stalked across the room to look out the front widow. That little push, the signal that a Flicker was about to start, tried to nudge its way inside Cait’s head once again.
She closed her eyes and concentrated, and as she had done previously, repelled the Flicker before it could begin. She had bigger issues to worry about right now than dealing with a mind-movie.
But something had been bothering her, unspoken but felt, hanging around the edges of her consciousness. She had been so busy trying to stay alive she hadn’t been able to pin down what it was, but now that Milo had stepped away for a moment, it crystallized in her mind: why the hell was she suddenly manifesting abilities concerning the Flickers that had never existed before? Did it have something to do with the proximity of her mother, who had similar abilities? Was it somehow related to the sudden appearance of her brother, the Human Psychotic Break himself?
Either way, Cait succeeded in blocking the Flicker, an important consideration since Milo’s mood seemed suddenly to have changed. He raced across the room toward her, his hurried steps in stark contrast to the almost languid way he had approached the window.
Something was happening, and it was happening outside.
The police! The police were here! What else could it be?
It made sense. The murdered officer had been out of contact for a while now, and the Everett police must have figured out that something was wrong. Cait’s heart skipped a beat and she began to allow herself to hope that maybe, just maybe, they could still escape this nightmare alive.
Then Milo passed by the couch, not even glancing at her. He strode hurriedly into the kitchen and grabbed the last of Victoria’s kitchen chairs, then turned and dragged it across the floor, placing it next to the couch. He held the knife tightly in his right hand as he eased into the chair, a look of grim determination on his face, immediately dashing Cait’s irrational hope of rescue. He was still in control, and it was clear he intended to stay in control until he finished whatever he came here to do.
She forced herself back against the cushions, levering her body into the V where the couch-back met the seat, pushing with her bound ankles against the armrest, trying to escape him.
It was stupid even to try, she knew that. There was no way she could simply disappear into the couch like the magician’s helper in some third-rate Vegas floor show, but rationality was beginning to slip away. The knife was big and long and razor-sharp, and the glittering deadly blade appeared mammoth as he displayed it mere inches from her face. Sickening smears of blackish maroon blood still stained it, left over from the butchering of the police officer. The killer had wiped the blade but had done so hurriedly and incompletely.
Cait strained against the back of the couch and Milo laughed, the sound simultaneously brutal and mocking. “Going somewhere?” he said.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t form the words. All she could think about was that big knife and the human being it had been used to kill, and the dreadful knowledge that she was moments away from suffering a similar fate.
Milo grabbed her right wrist, pulling it roughly toward him and plunking it onto his lap. Cait struggled and bucked and yanked her arm away and without warning her brother clubbed her in the side of the head with the knife handle. “Knock it off,” he rasped, veins sticking out on his forehead, his lips pressed in a bloodless line across his teeth. “If you struggle, I’ll make this much, much worse for you. And that’s something you don’t want, believe me.”
Cait believed him.
He returned her wrist to its previous location on his lap, staring into her eyes as he did so. Then he reached down and slashed it quickly across her skin and she screamed and he clamped his hand over her mouth and she looked down at her arm expecting to see blood gushing from the gash and there was nothing there and he laughed, long and loud.
“I used the dull end of the knife,” he said, still chuckling. “This time.”
And at that moment Cait realized she hated him. He was inhuman. Any sympathy she might have had for his horrible upbringing, any consideration she might have given him for being her brother, was gone. She saw him for what he was, a playground bully, a little boy burning ants in a field with a magnifying glass, a psychopathic monster without any shred of humanity.
Milo’s forehead wrinkled in concentration as he placed her arm in his lap one more time and Cait knew this time there would be no sick jokes, no fake cutting of skin. This time he was really going to slice her.
She whimpered, sounding pathetic, knowing it and hating herself for it but unable to stop. Almost as if on cue, across the room Kevin moaned, the first sound he had made since before the cop’s murder. As one, Cait and Milo glanced over at the interruption, Cait thankful not just for the few extra seconds it afforded her before the butchering began but also for the first real evidence in quite some time that Kevin was alive.
She watched as his head lolled, moving from his right shoulder to his left, his eyes still closed. Blood bubbled in a thick wad out of the knife wound in his chest, squeezing out around Cait’s makeshift bandage. His eyelids fluttered open and he seemed to take a look around the room. They passed over Cait unseeingly and then closed again and all movement stopped.
“That was interesting,” Milo said with a ghastly smile, and then he reached down and instead of slicing her arm as Cait had been expecting, he turned the knife blade sideways and peeled the skin of her arm back like he was peeling an apple. The shock was so great she gave no reaction at all. Not a scream, not a cry of pain, nothing.
And then Victoria’s telephone rang.
CHAPTER 49
Milo was annoyed but unsurprised when the phone jangled, the old broad’s ringtone set to sound just like the ancient black rotary phone his psycho parents had had in their kitchen in Amesbury.
It figured. This was just his luck. No sooner did he finally get down to business with the cute little bitch than the cops would pick the worst possible moment to stick their fucking pig noses into his business. He had no doubt it was the police calling. The old bitty who owned the house obviously didn’t have many friends, who else would it be?
The phone rang again and he ignored it. The little bitch’s eyes widened, then filled with water, and as her brain finally deciphered the distress signals being sent to it by the nerve endings in her injured arm, she let loose a jagged, panicked scream and Milo clapped his hand once more over her mouth.
He had not gagged her because he wanted to fully enjoy her reactions, but that had been a mistake on his part. The police were taking things slowly for now, but if they heard screaming coming from inside the house, they would undoubtedly be prompted to act more swiftly than he wanted them to.
The strip of skin he had peeled hung back from her arm, red and raw, flapping against her elbow as a surprisingly small amount of blood flowed. Milo had been doing this a long time and he was very skilled with a knife. In another life he thought he may have been a surgeon, not that he had any desire whatsoever to save lives. The knife-play every day would have been a real charge, though.
He sighed. In the kitchen the phone rang and rang and he knew that in order to buy himself the time he would need to finish up here he would have to answer it. An unanswered call would prompt too many questions in the heads of the pigs and they would be tempted to storm the house. They would launch concussion grenades through the windows and smash down the door and overpower him and everything would be over.