He’s not going to stop, she thought. He’s ... enjoying himself.
When he pranced past her head, she reached out and grabbed his ankles. She tugged, but he stayed up and lashed her harder than before, the belt whistling and slapping her sides and rump. Lurching forward, she tried to bite his ankle. He tore himself free and leaped backward in time to avoid her teeth.
“Ooee! A fighter! I’m gonna have fun with you.”
Dropping to his knees in front of Gillian, he grabbed her hair. She yelped and felt as if her scalp were being ripped as she was jerked up.
They were both on their knees, facing each other.
His fists were tight against the sides of her head, clenching her hair.
His face was blurry through Gillian’s tears, but she saw that he was still smiling. He had slobber on his chin.
His hands shot down. They snatched the neck of her blouse and yanked. The front flew open and he peeled the blouse off her shoulders, tugging it halfway down so it pinned her arms at her sides.
He stared at her breasts. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless.
“Where were you tonight?” he asked.
“I ... went ... for a walk.”
“Bad lie.” He pinched her nipples and twisted them. As pain streaked through her, she realized vaguely that he had let go, and then she saw a fist floating up from his side. It seemed to be coming at her very slowly and she thought that she should have no trouble at all ducking it, and then it crashed into her face.
The telephone was ringing. Gillian felt a rush of terror.
I won’t answer it, she thought. If I don’t pick it up, Mom and Dad will be all right. Just ignore it. It’ll stop.
It didn’t stop.
She sat up in bed.
The handset was in its cradle. Blood streamed from both ends. Puddles of blood were spreading over the top of the nightstand.
“No!” she cried out. “Stop!”
The phone kept ringing. The blood began to dribble off the nightstand’s edges.
Then the handset leaped from the cradle and flew at her. It sprayed her face with blood. It wrapped the cord around her neck. She started to choke. She pulled at the cord, but it tangled her hands, bound them.
The mouthpiece pressed against her mouth, spouting blood down her throat as the cord strangled her.
Then the receiver mashed her ear. “Your turn,” whispered the voice of the phone. “Your turn now.”
Gillian jerked awake.
But the nightmare didn’t stop. She was being choked. Her hands were bound. She struggled in the darkness, trying not to panic. The cord at her throat kept tightening. But when she straightened her arms, it loosened. She sucked air into her burning lungs.
A surge of motion tipped Gillian.
Something was vibrating under her. She could hear an engine sound and the hiss of wheels spinning on a road.
I’m in a car.
Her eyes saw only black. She blinked them to make sure they were open.
On a car floor. The back seat floor? she wondered. But no light. None at all. And no driveshaft bump under my side.
Gillian’s legs were bent. She began to straighten them, very slowly in case the movement should tighten the rope across her throat. Though she could feel that her ankles were tied, there didn’t seem to be any line connecting them to her neck. She unbent her knees a little more. A wire snagged one of her feet.
A tail light wire? A brake light wire? One or the other.
Gillian knew where she was.
In the trunk of Fredrick Holden’s car.
Her heart started slamming, pumping pain into her head, making her battered face burn.
Oooh, I’m gonna have fun with you.
Chapter Twenty
Rick wished, once again, that he had brought the bottle with him. He was shivering. His neck was stiff, and the rigid muscles seemed to go right up into the back of his skull, squeezing pain into his head. The bourbon might have helped. On the other hand, he would have polished it off a long time ago, probably during the first hour of his vigil, and he would’ve ended up totally plastered; it might’ve even been enough to knock him out.
I’d be no good to anyone, he thought, zonked out of my gourd.
Yeah. But what good is this, anyway?
This is doing a lot of good, he told himself. It’s the one sure way to keep those bastards from sneaking out of the woods and jumping us. And it got me away from Andrea, away from temptation.
Rick was seated on the ground with his back against a tree trunk, the revolver resting on his lap.
He thought about his visit from the preacher-man.
Jeez, what a performance!
The bastard was mad as a coot but most probably harmless. Christ, he’d been out in the wilderness for fifty years or more. Enough to turn anybody crazy ...
Through a gap in the bushes ahead, he could see Jase, Luke and Wally in their sleeping bags. If the boys had a tent, they’d decided not to use it. They’d sacked out around the fire.
The fire had still been flickering when Rick arrived. Later, nothing remained except a red glow, though sometimes a flame had climbed out of the rubble like a fatally wounded survivor, quivered in the darkness for a little while, and died. Even the glow had faded out, finally. For the past hour or so, the fire had been dark and smokeless.
Rick needed no firelight. He could see the shapes on the ground better without it. The night was cloudless and pale. Where direct moonlight made it through the trees (and a patch of it fell on his left knee), Rick thought it was almost bright enough to read by. It layered everything it touched with a milky hue. And it touched the sleeping figures of Jase, Luke and Wally. They were mottled with patches of dingy white. And totally black everywhere else, as if they didn’t exist at all except where the moon found them.
All three had seemed to be asleep when Rick arrived, and they hadn’t moved since, except to alter their positions slightly. One of the bags would bulge when a body curled up or rolled under its surface, would jut when a knee pushed it up.
From the size of the mound, Rick knew which bag held Wally. Jase and Luke were in the other two, but he didn’t know which was which. Even when the fire had been going, he hadn’t been able to tell them apart. One wore a hooded sweatshirt, the other a dark stocking cap, and their faces had been turned away or half buried in their sleeping bags.
Though he couldn’t tell which body was Jase, which Luke, all three of the creeps were accounted for. They were right here, asleep, and they wouldn’t be sneaking over to the other camp as long as Rick kept watch.
The watch, he had realized long ago, was probably unnecessary.
Several times, he’d almost convinced himself to quit and return to camp.
But maybe, just maybe, their plan was to get up in the dim hours before dawn and attack when they could be certain to catch everyone fast asleep.
They’d overpower us before we knew what was happening.
You don’t have to quit, Rick told himself now. You could just hurry over to the camp and take some aspirin (and grab the bottle?) and come back.
This headache’s going to kill me if I don’t do something about it.
Rick lifted the revolver off his lap. Slowly, he drew in his legs. He got his feet beneath him, pushed himself away from the tree trunk, and started to rise.
A sleeping bag flipped open.
Rick dropped to a squat.
Peering through the gap in the bushes, he saw moonlit bits and pieces of a person sitting up. It was the kid in the hooded sweatshirt. He couldn’t make out whether it was Jase or Luke.
His heart hammered, pounding spikes of pain into his head.
Thank God I didn’t leave, he thought. This is it. This is when they make their move.