No one else was present.
“Tina,” a familiar yet unrecognizable voice called from the car. “Your mother asked me to pick you up so you didn’t have to wait too long.”
“Who—” Tina started to ask but then realized it was Scott Goldman, the young man who was part of the same knitting club as her mother, one who she knew her mother was screwing during her nights away because she had pretended to be her mother once when Scott called looking for her.
“Come on, let’s go,” Scott said.
“She told me she would pick me up at five thirty,” Tina called back, an image of the two missing girls floating in her mind.
“Yeah, but she said she knows the library closed and thought you wouldn’t have a place to wait and told me to take you home and stay with you until she came home.”
Tina shook her head. “Thanks, but I think I’ll wait here anyway.” Even without two girls missing Tina would never have considered getting in the car with him, not when his favorite pastime seemed to be knitting with a bunch of women and fucking the ones twice his age. No thank you.
“Tina, your mother wants me to take you home.” His voice was growing harsh, yet couldn’t mask the juvenileness that it still carried. “Now get in this car.”
“No.” Tina turned and looked back and wished the janitor really had gotten the principal or dean or some school official.
“Tina, I’m not going to ask you again.” Scott got out of the car and stood with his arms crossed.
“Fuck you!” Tina shouted and started back toward the girl’s locker room.
Scott followed.
Panic developed as she neared the door, but it wasn’t overwhelming because she knew he wouldn’t follow her inside the girl’s locker room.
“Tina!”
Tina grabbed the door handle and pulled, but nothing happened. The door was locked.
Shit!
The panic increased.
“Tina, get in that car right now!” Scott said. His voice was too close.
Tina turned. Scott was standing ten feet away from her, anger covering his face.
“I’m serious!”
Tina ran.
Scott followed.
The main entrance to the school wasn’t far, just up and around the corner from the locker room doors. The only problem was she had to scale a large hill that went up the side of the school, one which equaled two flights worth of stars inside of the building, thereby making the locker rooms a part of the subbasement even though they had their own outside doors.
Making matter worse the grass was wet from the rain earlier and about halfway up Tina slipped, her right leg just seeming to disappear the moment she put pressure on it, the ankle crunching as she landed. A horrible numbness vibrated through the leg, one which made standing impossible.
Thankfully Scott was having trouble with the hill as well and couldn’t reach her level and by the time he started to get the hang of it the numbness had cleared and she managed to stand back up.
The rest of the climb was no easier, but she made it without slipping and then around the building to the main entrance, which she charged into much to the dismay of the hall monitor at the front hallway desk.
“Whoa, slow down,” the monitor said. She was the same young lady that often walked around the lunch room, the school officials thinking the presence of hall monitors would discourage any rowdiness.
“There’s a man chasing me,” Tina said.
“What?”
“A man is chasing me.”
The woman glanced at the entrance, which was still empty and said, “Are you sure?”
“YES!”
Just then Scott came in.
“That’s him!” Tina shouted.
Another hall monitor had come on the scene now.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Her mother sent me to pick her up,” Scott said. “But she ran away from me.”
“My mother told me she would pick me up herself,” Tina said. “And he tried forcing me in his car.”
Scott put his hands up. “I did not try to force her into the car I just told her to stop acting like this and get in the car.”
The hall monitors looked back and forth at each other for a moment and then the young man turned to Tina and said, “Do you know him?”
“Not really. My mother does, but I’ve never really met him.”
The monitor turned to Scott. “Her mother asked you to pick her up even though you two have never met knowing two girls have disappeared?”
Scott shrugged. “She just didn’t want Tina waiting for ever at the school.”
“What’s going on?” another adult asked, this one having come out of the main office.
The hall monitors explained the situation.
“Okay, into my office, both of you. I want to call her mother and find out what’s going on.” He then whispered something to the one hall monitor. Tina couldn’t hear all of it but was sure one of the words was sheriff.
From there the three headed into the office, Tina keeping the school official between herself and Scott.
“Hey Mom,” Alan said. “Have you noticed anything odd about Jimmy lately?”
The two were in the kitchen, Alan helping clear up the dinner mess the family had left. Jimmy himself was down in his room and their father had flipped on an episode of The Office.
“Jimmy? No.”
“Really?” Alan asked.
“Have you?” she asked. She seemed to be examining an old sponge while asking this, one which probably added more bacteria than took away when applied to the dishes.
“Well, I don’t know,” Alan said, his voice careful because he knew Jimmy had a way of appearing out of nowhere at times, his movements almost naturally stealthy. “He just hasn’t seemed himself lately and—”
“I’m going for a bike ride!” Jimmy called, his presence in the entryway having gone unnoticed until he spoke.
“Okay honey!” his mother called. “Be careful.”
Alan waited until his brother left and said, “See, that’s what I’m talking about. Why all these sudden bike rides?”
“He just rides at night after dinner,” she said while tossing the sponge into the garbage can. “I have friends who go on walks every night or jog in the morning.”
“Yeah but he goes a few times every day. In the morning he wakes up at like five and goes on a ride in the dark and at night once everyone goes to bed he heads out again sometimes.”
Kelly opened a new sponge and wetted it.
“It’s… I don’t know?” Alan added before she could reply.
“He’s just restless.” She started scrubbing the plates.
“Maybe,” Alan said, though he knew it wasn’t that. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t just the bike rides. Jimmy’s entire personally seemed different, almost cautious at times like he was giving more thought to things. At first Alan assumed it was because of Tina and the prom, but now didn’t think that was really it.
Chapter Ten
“Ugh,” Jimmy gasped as he pulled open the heavy door and stepped into the fallout shelter. It smells like shit.
Thankfully it wasn’t actually fecal matter that he smelled, just a combination of urine and body odor, but it was still enough to stop him in his tracks and momentarily kill his sex drive. Even worse, he had known something like this would happen given the small space and lack of circulation and had even started to notice a growing foulness, but didn’t do anything about it, his mind able to ignore it at first. Now he couldn’t. A smell like this could kill an elephant.
And I can’t leave the door open.
No toilets, no shower, and no way to quickly ventilate the space. It obviously wasn’t a first rate fallout shelter the Hood family had created. In fact, Jimmy was pretty sure it had been a last minute creation, probably one that had originally been a storm shelter that they tried to convert — something they could duck into when the foreign paratroopers dropped in and wait out their advance until the lines moved beyond the area.