But there was a car parked off to the side. A newer car, not one abandoned years ago along with the rusted heaps that were once garbage trucks. Someone was still here.
She ran to it as fast as she could without falling and crashed against the driver’s window. She screamed and pounded her fists on the glass. Maybe there were kids in there, other teenagers who had come here to drink and fuck.
No response. She cupped her hands and peered in. Empty other than scattered sheets of paper on the passenger seat.
She tried the handle and almost fell over when the door opened. The courtesy light was a tiny sun that blinded her. She could hide in here, maybe. Victor wouldn’t find her. Hell, he was probably dead.
You don’t really believe that, Miss Cynical said. This is probably his car.
“Holy shit,” she said.
It was his car. She had seen it parked outside Rune Books several times. She recognized the long dent in the hood as if something heavy had fallen on it. If Victor survived the stabbing, he would come back to his car. It definitely wasn’t safe.
But he wouldn’t suspect she’d hide in it, either. She could crawl into the back and wait for him. Once he got into the driver’s seat, she could kill him.
That thought filled her with complete confidence and joy for a fraction of a second before completely dissolving. She couldn’t kill him. Stabbing him had been bad enough and she didn’t even have a weapon anymore. She’d have to strangle him with her bare hands. She could feel his skin against her own, his pointed Adam's apple bobbing against her palm as he choked and struggled.
She couldn’t do it.
So, what the hell are you going to do? Mom this time. Because cancer tried to run me down and I didn’t just lie down and take it.
Mercy got into the car. The light hurt her eyes. She opened the compartment between the seats. It was stuffed with tissues crusted with mucus. No, not mucus. It was semen.
She almost vomited. Instead, she turned to the glove compartment.
She could hardly believe what she found.
SIXTY-THREE
The keys were stashed in the glove compartments of each car for just-in-case scenarios. Victor firmly believed that the universe would protect him, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t take intelligent precautions. If everything went to hell, he needed an easy escape. He didn’t care what happened to Caleb. He had told him that Victor’s car would be in the HIKERS ONLY lot, too.
Victor pulled the car out of the lot and stopped in the middle of the road as if he were staging a blockade. He glanced down the road in both directions. He would run her over first. Then slice her throat. Maybe he’d even rape her once more. He could baptize her in the blood from his injury. Smear it all over her face. Make her drink it.
She was either running down the side of the road where brush provided some coverage and obscured the the light of the moon or she was hiding.
There was only one place to hide that she could have reached so quickly.
He turned left and stomped on the gas.
She had probably found the way in through the back of the building. Thought she was safe in there. Stupid bitch. Other than Blood Mountain, Victor knew the insides of the former headquarters of Murray Waste Co. as if he had designed them in his dreams.
The car didn’t even reach forty miles-per-hour before the building was upon him. He slowed and started to turn off the road when another car rumbled out of the darkness and clipped his front bumper.
The car spun and came to a stop half on the road.
The other car stopped too. His car.
“You fucking bitch!” Victor yelled.
He crushed the accelerator. The wheels spun on the dirt and the back end fishtailed for a moment before the tires caught and the car lunged forward.
He crashed into the back of his own car. It jumped forward and then spun its wheels for moment before screeching down the road.
He followed. The main center of Stone Creek was several minutes away. She wasn’t going to chance going all the way to the police station. There was only one place she was headed.
Victor should have known from the very beginning.
SIXTY-FOUR
The engine screamed and Mercy screamed right along with it. She had wasted time and now he was right behind her. It was Caleb’s car but Caleb was dead or paralyzed somewhere while crows pecked at his eyes. It was Victor in the car. She couldn’t escape. He had devised his psychotic scheme and no matter what she tried, he had thought of it before.
She could drive all the way into town, go to the police station and the lone officer on duty would be off on some call Victor had paid someone to make. He’d kill her right in the lobby of the police station. He’d know which way to turn his back so the cameras couldn’t catch a clear shot of his face. He was going to kill her and get away with it.
The red and yellow neon sign for Alexis Diner hovered in the dark sky. They were open 24-hours, but who would actually be there? How much staff was really needed at three in the morning on a Sunday? There would be at least one waitress and a cook. The cook would have knives. That would have to be good enough.
She came upon the diner in only seconds and had to slam the breaks and turn the wheel hard to make the entrance. The back tires skidded and jumped the curb but the car made the turn and she straightened it out in time to avoid crashing into a parked black mini-van.
The car turned around behind the diner. In the rearview, the beat-up Toyota made the turn off Route 51 into the parking lot with less success: the whole car rode up and over the curb and barreled straight into the mini-van. The sound of the collision was a dinosaur growl of vengeance.
I hope it killed you, she thought without any real hope that it had.
She turned back to the windshield in time to see the white cadillac parked behind the kitchen where a door was propped open with a plastic crate.
Then she crashed into the cadillac and hoped she wouldn’t survive either.
SIXTY-FIVE
Victor was mildly aware of the hot liquid sensation growing in his crotch. He hadn’t pissed himself. There was too much liquid, too much weight, for that. He reached into the puddle of blood and raised his arm. Red streaks sluiced off his hand.
The car bounced over something and he rocketed into the back of a mini-van. The collision threw him against the steering wheel and he was sure a few ribs broke. His left hand, with the mutilated fingers flopped off the dashboard and it seemed like such an innocent, harmless thing as if his was a Gumby limb, but the flash of pain said he had broken the rest of those fingers and probably the wrist, too, if not also his forearm.
He stumbled free of the car and dropped to one knee. Blood fell freely from his injury to splatter on the concrete. It looked like a giant ink blot as it pooled across the diagonal blue lines of the handicapped space.
He had lost his weapons. Even the brass knuckles had come off. They were in the car but he couldn’t go back. He might pass out and he wasn’t going to surrender so close to the end. It didn’t matter. There were plenty of things he could use in the diner. Not to mention the set of knives in the kitchen or the scalding griddle.
He got to his feet, one hand over his wound, and ascended the steps into Alexis Diner where the bright lights burned his eyes.
SIXTY-SIX
Mercy Higgins didn’t die. She came to with her head resting on the top of the steering wheel and a terrific pain radiating through her chest. Hadn’t had time for a seatbelt, she thought and tried to straighten.