The Remedy (31 page)

Leigh was blinded by the sun the moment she stepped outside. She put her hand up to shield her eyes and that was when she saw it: half of the cabin blown away, jet-black smoke billowing from the flaming crater.

Sam…

There was a thunderous slam and the sound of wood cracking behind her. She looked back to see Rob ripping the entrance of the barn open, the sliding door almost flying off its hinges.

Leigh didn’t know what scared her more—the bloodthirsty smile on Rob’s face or the black iron blade of the massive ax in his hands.

For the second time, the destroyed cabin bought Leigh precious time. Rob couldn’t help but look over and study the explosion’s aftermath.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered to no one in particular, hypnotized by the burning timber.

Leigh’s legs reacted on their own:

Run
.

The cool morning air chilled the perspiration glazing her skin as she took off into the woods. Branches whipped across the tender skin of her cheeks and chin, leaving behind red welts. She did not need to look back or even hear his footsteps to know Rob was right behind her. The curtain of leaves and tangled arms of the tree branches impeded her progress, but he knew how to dodge the obstacles the forest put before him. He’d been in these woods many times. Maybe even played this same game of cat-and-mouse with a past victim. This idea became more and more probable as he closed the gap between them.

“I gave you a chance,” he said, his voice even closer than Leigh had assumed. “I could’ve made you happy.”

Leigh darted ninety degrees to her right, zigzagging between the thick underbrush. She’d once seen a nature documentary about how some prey escaped predators by quickly changing direction and catching their pursuer off guard. Strange how she was able to recall such information at time like this, but she didn’t question it.

She looked back, trying to catch a glimpse of Rob’s location, but there was no sign of him, although she could still hear his panting breath and the snapping twigs under his shoes, seemingly coming from every direction.

Then he was upon her.

Strong fingers caught her ankle, making her knees buckle and sending her crashing to the forest floor below. She clenched her eyes shut, painfully anticipating the fall of the rusty ax.

“Watch your step, Leigh!”

Her eyes sprang open. Rob’s voice was still a few feet away.

Leigh looked down at her feet to see a tree root wrapped around her ankle. A short distance beyond, a drape of branches and brush parted to reveal the heavily sweating, ax-bearing maniac.

Rob stopped in his tracks upon spotting her. She could see the whites of his wide, frenzied eyes, and there was a growing edema swelling from his right cheekbone. Dark streaks smeared the handle of the ax, blood from his hand wound running against the grain of the wood. The dirt, grime, and dried blood darkening Rob’s face made the teeth of his mad grin look even brighter.

He took a step forward. There was probably no point in running anymore; Rob was far too close now to ever escape him. Any attempt to get away would be a waste of time. It made more sense to just get it over with and not drag out her torment any longer.

But still, she got up and ran.

Leigh ripped her foot away from the tangled root and made for the evergreen stand ahead. Even if Rob’s ax would be on her any second now, it would be better not to see it coming.

The long bough of a pine tree stretched out exactly in her eye line. Raising her hand, Leigh pushed the branch aside, its flexible soft wood bending but not breaking with her push.

Behind her, she knew, Rob hoisted the ax over his head.

Leigh took one last leaping step.

The pine branch shot back like a whip, slicing Rob directly across the eyes.

“Fuck!” Rob screamed, momentarily blinded. He brought a hand to his brow and rubbed his eyes, the pain halting his pursuit.

Leigh continued to bound over fallen logs and moss-covered stones. The thrashing tree limb had been nothing short of a gift from God. Or maybe just a little help from Mother Nature. The feeling that fate might be on Leigh’s side fueled her exhausted lungs and legs with hope.

A moment later, she realized just how wrong she’d been. God had chosen a side.

But it wasn’t hers.

She bobbed in the air four times before she understood what had happened. The clutches that squeezed her left ankle and dangled her six feet above the ground was a snare trap—a rope that stretched from a tree branch high above.

Leigh wasn’t going anywhere.

Whimpering as she struggled to reach the loop around her ankle, Leigh choked on her own breath when she saw the upside-down image of Rob strolling up to her side.

“Well, hello there,” he said, the ax casually resting on his shoulder. “It appears I caught something. But what strange species is this?”

Long, hot streams of tears ran over Leigh’s eyebrows and into her hair. She could feel the blood rushing to her head, dizzying her vision.

“Wait! Rob! Don’t!” Her hands shot forward as if she could stop his attack.

Rob chuckled as he brought the ax off his shoulders and into his hands. “Look at this. It talks!”

“You don’t want to do this, Rob.”

“Of course I do.” Rob squeezed the ax’s handle, twisting the wood in his sweaty palms. “I mean, what else am I going to have for dinner?”

Leigh was on autopilot, frantically blabbering in a last-ditch effort to save her own life. “I’m sorry, Rob. I was wrong to attack you. We should be together, I see that now.”

Rob inhaled as if to spit out another sarcastic remark, but froze with Leigh’s last comment. She saw the hesitation in his eyes and that encouraged her to bring forth more words.

“It’s true. Please forgive me, I was scared before. But now it’s all so clear. You and I are the same. We should be together.”

He smiled and looked at the ground, the aggression just barely leaving his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Rob. I’m so sorry. I made a mistake, but it’ll never happen again.”

Looking up from under his eyebrows, Rob bared a grin that Satan himself would’ve envied.

“No,” he said, lifting the ax into the air. “It
won’t
happen again.”

Leigh wanted to shut her eyes, but they were propped open with fear. She could do nothing but watch as Rob brought the ax behind him, winding himself up to deliver a decapitating swing.

Here it comes
.

The ax had completed half of its journey toward her head when Leigh suddenly plummeted to the ground, her descent accompanied by the explosive crack of a gunshot.

Rob passed over her crumpled body, connecting with nothing but air. The momentum of his swing twisted his body in a complete 360-degree rotation.

Leigh lay in a heap at Rob’s feet. She looked up at him, knowing he must be thinking the same thing: had he missed and sliced the rope? No, it was impossible. Even if he’d swung a little high, the ax would’ve buried itself into Leigh’s chest or stomach. Something else had broken the rope.

The gunshot
.

A twig snapped behind her. Rob looked up from Leigh, surprise widening his eyes. In an inappropriately light tone, as if a salesman had knocked on his front door, he asked, “What do
you
want?”

A second later, he got his answer.

Leigh shrieked at the explosion of a second gunshot echoing through the morning air. Blood shot out the back of Rob’s head, a puzzled look frozen in his features. The ax fell from his limp grip, landing inches away from Leigh’s hip. Wobbling for a few seconds as if to deny his own demise, Rob finally followed, collapsing.

He landed facing Leigh, his blank stare looking directly into hers. Part of her expected an evil spirit to crawl from the void that the bullet had left in one of Rob’s eye sockets, as if a slug-like parasite had been controlling his actions all along.

But no such thing occurred. The man lying next to her was only a fresh corpse, a lifeless body that could never harm anyone ever again. But Leigh couldn’t take her eyes away from his, even as she heard someone slowly approach her.

Above her, she heard a man’s voice say, “Miss? Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

The figure above her appeared as a silhouette from the sunlight backlighting him. Though she could not see his face, when he knelt to examine her, she was able to read a nametag on his right breast pocket.

JACOB SPIRE
.

It would be the last thing Leigh would see for a while. She closed her eyes, letting her consciousness slip away. Warm, gentle fingers lightly touched her neck, looking for a pulse.

When the man said, “We’re going to get you out of here. Everything’s going to be fine,” Leigh thought she was dreaming.

Leigh could’ve sworn the minute hand was actually ticking backward as she stared at the clock on the wall above the blackboard. She’d long stopped listening to Professor Henderson drone on about the case of Williams vs. the State of Maine, her mind far too preoccupied to focus. There were only three minutes left until class was over, but those three minutes may as well have been an hour. Normally, Leigh wouldn’t have been nearly as anxious to leave a classroom

But today was different.

Today was their one-year anniversary. And she knew Sam would already be waiting for her when she returned to her room.

Just as she was considering grabbing her bag and leaving behind Henderson’s turned back, the professor spun from the chalkboard and clapped his hands.

“Class dismissed. Enjoy your weekend.”

Leigh couldn’t recall grabbing her bag, rushing through the classroom door, or even leaving the building. Her entire trip across the UVM campus to the door of Hamilton dormitory was a blur.

Leigh skipped her usual leisurely ride up the elevator, because three flights of stairs proved no challenge today. Even with a bag full of textbooks weighing her down, Leigh felt light as air.

And then she was at her door.

She brushed back her air, removed her glasses, took a deep breath, and entered her room.

As usual, she was greeted by the poster of Johnny Depp that hung above her bed. But today she was not interested in the movie star, as attractive as he might be, dressed as a swashbuckling pirate. Today, nothing could distract her from the man hiding beneath her sheets and comforter.

“I see you under there,” she said, removing the strap of her book bag from her shoulder. She threw the bag onto the desk that sat on the opposite wall, kicked off her shoes, and prepared to pounce on the blanket covering her lover.

“Make room!” she said, taking a step forward.

But she halted.

Something felt wrong.

Very
wrong.

Her desk didn’t usually sit against the wall across from her bed. It had always been at the foot of her bed, bordered by her mini-refrigerator. Something else was supposed to occupy the space where her desk rested now: a second bed.

Alex’s bed.

Though the light bulb above Leigh bathed the room in its sixty-watt luminescence, the space now appeared much darker, as if the light were being filtered through a black curtain.

She slowly turned back to the hidden mass underneath her bed covers. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew Sam would make everything all right. He always did.

She pulled back the blanket. The sheets followed.

Leigh could feel herself screaming—the air rushing from her lungs, the tendons in her neck tightening, threatening to snap. But she could hear nothing, as if her life had instantly transformed into a silent movie. The only sense still functioning was her sight, and she wished that it, too, had been taken from her.

The fungus-engulfed head and shoulders of Eliza rested on her pillow, a severed stump of flesh leaking red and green fluids that ran together into a sickly shade of brown like a bloody patch of mushrooms.

Something behind her cracked with volatile ferocity as the noise of the world came crashing back into her ears. Leigh spun toward the sound just in time to see the wood of her door splinter into a ragged gash as something hard and sharp crashed against it.

She looked down at her shoes. Despite her panicked urge to run, her traitorous legs wouldn’t move. She was frozen. Stuck.

Trapped.

A final scrap of wood flew from the door, leaving a gaping hole. A familiar face grinned at Leigh through the jagged portal.

Rob
.

“Don’t worry about her,” he said, using the blade of his massive ax to point at what was left of Eliza. He stared at Leigh with his one eye. In the other’s place was an empty socket, glowing with a blinding, crimson light. “She’s out of the picture.”

Leigh looked away, desperately searching for something to defend herself with. But there was nothing within reach, her room suddenly and impossibly empty. The only thing that remained was her dorm room’s single window. But instead of her third-floor view of Hamilton’s parking lot, all she could see through the glass was trees: dark, endless trees.

She was back in the forest.

She turned from the window to find Rob’s face an inch from her nose. This close up, she could see right into his empty socket. Green tendrils of mold crawled out from the hole like snakes.

“They’re all dead,” she moaned.

“Yes,” Rob whispered, bringing the ax above his head. “And now, we can be together.”

Again, Leigh tried to cry out. She opened her mouth to scream again. What came out was rhythmic, gentle, machine-like…

Beep. Beep. Beep
.

Upon waking, Leigh didn’t have the slightest clue as to where she was. But she could tell that she was warm, comfortable.

Safe.

Taupe-colored walls surrounded her on all sides. A television high on the wall across her from her played a daytime talk show, its volume muted. The window to her left let in soft rays of light that ran across her face and reflected off a panel of machines to her right. One of those machines had a narrow, green screen where a line would jump every second or so.

Beep. Beep. Beep
.

A heart monitor. Leigh was in a hospital.