Ruthless (9 page)

CHAPTER TEN

CONSIDERING THAT THERE IS A
sexual predation-slash-serial killer hunting me through these woods, I'm feeling pretty good. The food has gone to work in my body, and it's doing some amazing things. My muscles don't hum with fatigue, also nice. I found another mountain stream, this one good-size, and I drank my fill of water.

At some point I'll get to deal with all the waterborne parasites I'm taking in. But that's only if I'm very, very lucky.

The other thing that's left me feeling better is the fact I've lost my mind.

Nothing normal is in there, that's for sure. I can't think about my family or friends or even the other girls from my dream. Those thoughts are no longer allowed. It's not something to question, just to obey.

Thinking about people is not allowed.

Right-o. You're the boss.

A weird dialogue has started to pop back and forth inside my head, like there's two people in there. It keeps me entertained.

Although I've lost my mind, I'm not crazy. I'm following the road, while staying a good thirty yards into the forest. My thinking is, the road will take me to civilization, and the forest will keep me covered. Seems like a good enough plan, and if it's not, it's not. I've lost my ability to worry, at least for now.

The truck has not yet made an appearance, which is a good thing. I tell myself there's a chance Wolfman has fled the scene altogether, but it's not a lie I'm really interested in buying.

I'm glad I've given up worrying, because if I was in the business of worrying, I'd be worrying about how cold it's getting. It's getting really, really cold. And I'm still naked. This is probably the longest continuous stretch of nakedness in my entire life. Even when I was a baby, at least I spent time in blankets.

Along with the cold, I notice my skin. The drying mud keeps flaking off, leaving more and more snow-white flesh to glow in the darkness. It's probably time for me to re-mud myself, but the idea of crawling into chilly mud does not appeal. It may even bring on hypothermia and kill me. Super-good thing I'm not worrying anymore.

Eventually a wallow of thick, mostly dry mud presents itself. I decide I need camouflage more than I need to stay warm. Clambering in like a sow, I reapply my full-body mud mask. It's not quite as cold as I feared, but it's not warm, either. There's no sign of the
Wolfman, so I take time to pat the mud into my skin wherever I can reach.

Unfortunately, my arms don't work too well these days. Neither one of them is willing to go above shoulder height. With my left arm, the one with the bullet wound, I think it's because too much of the muscle got cut, and so now it doesn't want to lift my arm up. With my right arm, it seems like there's something torn up inside the shoulder joint, along with other damage down the length of it.

So glad I'm done worrying about these things.

The one thing I do care about are my feet.

They hurt. They hurt in a way I didn't know feet could hurt. I've avoided looking at the bottoms of them, because that's a sight I just don't need to see. Better to not even think about it.

Don't worry, be happy
, I sing inside my head.
Pick your way through dense forest while listening for any sign of the man trying to hunt you down and kill you.
It's a catchy tune.

How many miles have I walked? I have no idea. My pace is a slow one, at best. If it takes fifteen minutes to walk a mile, how many minutes does it take if you choose your route carefully, over hill and dale and rocks and stumps and thorn bushes and underbrush? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? It seems like I've gone a hundred miles, but this seems a tad high for an actual guess.

Time is tricky out here too. It feels like forever since I left the Logan garage, but that's just a feeling. I have a sneaky suspicion it's not all that long.

At least the mountain sky is beautiful, filled with stars, and I do appreciate that bright, autumn moon.

“Hello, Moon.” I mouth the words, wanting to talk to someone, but not wanting to make a sound. It's nice to talk to the moon. Our relationship isn't complicated. I've never done wrong by the moon, and the moon's never done wrong by me. I can think about the moon without crying, or feeling weak, or hopeless. “Thank you for being there for me.”

The moon doesn't reply.

“It's nice of you,” I mouth. “You've been a good friend.”

A moment passes between us.

“A good friend when I needed one most.”

The moon and me will never be the same if we make it out of this.

Some time has gone by without me double-checking to make sure I'm paralleling the road. Sometimes the trees are open enough I can catch a glimpse of it, looking like a giant, pale snake in the dark. When the foliage stays too thick for too long, I walk out to make sure it's there. Each time I check, a little bit of worry comes to life. The closer I am to the road, the more exposed to the Wolfman I feel.

There's a punch of anxiety when the road isn't where I expected it to be. It's a good thing I decided to check, as I'd started to veer away from it and into the mountains. It takes longer than I'd like to find it, and when I do, it's almost as if I want to put my feet on it, just for the comfort of knowing it's there, and not leaving me behind.

Once on the road, I look up and see another house. My case of crazy brain clears a little, giving way to a new sharpness.

The house is dark, but then, it's the middle of the night. There might be people at home. If I'm lucky, there are people home. The Logans be damned, I refuse to be afraid of asking for help. I choose to believe that the Logans are one in a million, that most people would help me. Even so, the fancy lines of this new house make me nervous. It's an expensive mountain lodge, like the Logans' place. I distrust it on a gut level.

The problem, more than my newfound irrational fear of high-end mountain homes, is that this house is way over to the left, while the road is clearly arcing to the right.

Do I stick with the road?

Or do I head for the house?

I believe the road is headed toward civilization, that it's the main road out of here, but that's just a guess. It could turn back toward the mountains and go on and on forever without getting anywhere useful at all.

The house, meanwhile, is a guarantee. It's definitely there. There's no denying that.

Perhaps in part to prove to myself I'm not scared of people, I head for the house. And force myself to hope that someone is home.

The house is on the second ridge away from me. Keeping on the ridgelines would take out the intense climbing, but once I'm into the trees, it'll be that much harder to find my way. If I go straight, I think I can get there without getting lost. There's a giant oak on the first ridge, and I aim for that.

“C'mon, Moon,” I whisper, and head downhill.

The descent down to the valley floor is longer and far more difficult than it looked from the road. At least there's a nice stream down here. I pause for a drink. I'm tired from the climb down, and I'm dreading the climb up.

As I scoop the water into my mouth, something moves in the woods far above me.

It's not the wind. It's big. Living. And it hasn't stopped moving.

It's to my left, and I hear it for about three seconds before the forest falls back into silence.

My heart thuds at a million miles an hour, but I haven't moved. I've frozen in place, like a deer on a busy road. But I'm not sure moving is a good idea. If it's him, moving will only serve to tell him where I am. My mud camouflage almost completely covers me. I must be hard to spot down here in this streambed. Even so, a part of me is certain that a bullet is about to end everything. The silence goes on and on.

As my heartbeat slows, reason drifts back into my thinking. I am in a huge wilderness area. There will be deer here. Bears. ­Coyotes.

No, that was no coyote. It was big.

Well, bear, then. Or deer. Thing is, not every sound in the forest will be the Wolfman. Whatever it was, it was a good distance away from me. If it was him, the sounds would continue and head in my direction. After a long wait, I begin to climb uphill. It's extremely steep, and I take breaks every couple of minutes in order to rest and to listen. I hear nothing else on my long, long way up.

Reaching the top of the ridge is all kinds of wonderful. My
thigh muscles burn from the climb, and it's nice to simply stand and rest for a second. Far better than that, however, is the sight of how close the house is. Another hike down and back up again would have been almost impossible, but now I can work my way to the house along the ridgeline without any fear of getting lost.

Yay for no more climbing, and I'm closer. Closer than I thought.

“Look at that, Moon,” I say. “Good news.”

Then something catches my eye. It's a long ways off, and at first I don't know what it is. It's red, blue, red, blue.

Sound, always on the heels of light, reaches me next. It's faint, barely audible, but I recognize it as rubber rolling on rocks.

It's a cop car, on the gravel road I left behind. Left so far, far behind.

So, the Logans called 911 after all. Something crumbles and dies inside me as I watch the cop car travel the lane. I could have been there, could have intercepted them. My rescue could be happening this very second. Energy drains away from me, as though my feet had holes in them like a sieve, and my energy is pouring out onto the ground. Of course, my feet
do
have holes in them.

My gut told me the Logans would call 911. Why didn't I think that the road would be a good place to meet a cop? Especially when I also believed that the road was the way back to civilization? Why am I not connecting these dots?

I'm exhausted.

I'm so exhausted I'm impaired.

I don't know what to do. I wonder if I should turn around and head back to the Logan house.

Beneath my feet is a nearly vertical hillside. Climbing up it was hard. Negotiating the path down without taking a nasty fall would be even harder. With a huge climb to follow. It's too much; it's overwhelmingly too much.

The house is close.

That means a phone is close.

I choose the house. Because it is easier. No, not easier. Possible.

It doesn't take long, maybe ten minutes, to pick my way to the high-end mountain home. As with the Logan place, the sight of the house makes me feel my injuries, and there's a new feeling in my wounds. A sort of unnatural warmth, a heat that makes me think of infection. I consider the idea that infection and fever are why I'm not connecting dots like I should.

On the plus side, I don't feel my injuries as sharply as I did walking up to the Logan place. Maybe because I've lost confidence that a house means salvation.

Once I'm right up next to the place, I realize how massive it is. This thing could eat the Logan Family Lodge for breakfast.

The mountain mansion has a feeling of emptiness about it, despite the nice landscaping out front. A home alarm system sign is in the yard. I don't like the idea of forcing it to go off, but I tell myself that if the people are home, they'll wake up in a hurry. If they're not, the alarm will bring the cops, so either way, the alarm is a good thing.

The driveway is dirt, which is nice on my feet, and I follow it up to the paving stones that lead to the front door.

Man, this house looks empty.

I try to coach myself into positive thinking. If it's empty, I'll just break into it, and if the alarm doesn't sound, I'll use their phone. My third broken window in the last . . . however many hours it's been. God only knows, at this point.

Still, though, the darkness, the hulking size of the lodge, the everything—it makes me uneasy. Trepidation slows my steps. Is it good instincts, or have I already contracted PTSD from the Logan experience? The front door is right there, but I don't want to knock.

Then, behind me, I hear something. It's small, but enough to send me spinning around.

It's him.

In the trees.

Watching.

In an instant it's clear. He was following me. He saw me head for the house. The sound above me in the woods was him paralleling me, taking a shortcut. He's playing another game, one far more sophisticated than my own.

I feel myself losing this contest, feel the Wolfman winning.

Five Years Ago

THE GIRL IS TRYING NOT
to feel contempt for her mother. They're sitting at an Applebee's, eating dinner, but only the mother is speaking. Everyone else—the girl, her father, the boy, and his mother—just listens. Tomorrow the girl competes. Now is a time for focus, for confidence. But the girl's grandmother has decided to make a surprise visit to watch the show, prompting a meltdown in her daughter, who cannot stop talking.

The girl doesn't say anything. She wants to eat her hamburger and tune out the worried blather, but she can't. The needless whining burrows itself into her mind, irritating it, forcing it to react, to judge. There is no place for this sort of weakness. The world will not tolerate it. Certainly, there is no room for the girl to be weak. It's not a luxury she can afford, not when so much rides on her shoulders. Her father can be harsh, but he's not wrong about his wife—if she had the killer instinct, everyone
would know her name, know how good she is. She would be a success.

The girl has the killer instinct. She can feel it, a hard core of iron inside her. It does not bend or break; it does not shy away from difficulty. It is brave and courageous and it suffers no fools. Winners are ruthless. They create their own luck by controlling their environment, making it work for them. It occurs to the girl this way of being should extend outside the exercise ring.

“Let's not talk,” the girl commands, bold and declarative.

Everyone at the table freezes. The boy's eyes go wide, shocked at her brazenness.

The girl takes a big bite of her hamburger. Her parents, the boy, and his mother all follow suit, turning to their meals in silence.