After buying the drink, as she made her way back to her prey—Carrie couldn’t help but picture him as a fish thrashing about on the hook she had so masterfully baited—she had dropped a couple of roofies into the glass, where they had fizzed for a moment and then disappeared as she stirred with her finger. Two tabs was probably overdoing it, considering the slightness of Burton Daniels’ physique, but Carrie was not inclined to be particularly merciful, considering his sins of so long ago.
She rushed him through his spiked drink and then hurried him around the dance floor and out the door of Klub Elektro—no problem navigating the three carpeted steps to the doorway, her mind was sober and crystal-clear—with the truthful and utterly sincere promise of a night he would never forget. She wanted to be sure he was safely packed away in her little car before the full effect of the drugs worked their way through his system.
It had all gone off without a hitch, as she had known that it would.
A prolonged groan behind her told Carrie that Burton Daniels would soon be regaining consciousness—finally—and then the main event could begin. The inside of the aluminum storage unit, lit by the soft glow of a battery-powered portable lantern, thrummed with the sound of heavy rain pounding the roof. The effect was almost hypnotic, and Carrie found herself remembering bits and pieces of the horror Burton Daniels had inflicted upon her so many years ago.
Visions of utter, unrelenting terror flashed through her memory, unwanted and unstoppable: The sour smell of Daniels as he forced himself upon her, sodomized her, humiliated her, damaged her, transforming her from a sweet, trusting young girl into the obsessed, single-minded vengeance-seeker she had become. Tonight at last it would all end. She had finally caught up with him and would extract the pound of flesh, so to speak, she had dreamt about for so long.
“Wh—where am I? Who the hell are you?” The question was whispered hesitantly but might as well have been shouted. Burton Daniels had finally awakened. Carrie smiled and turned to face the man who had ruined her.
“You’re in a place where we have complete privacy. Isn’t that nice?”
Daniels was strapped into some sort of customized rig that looked a bit like a dentist’s chair. Sturdy leather straps, one firmly fastened at each wrist and one at each elbow, along with a similar strap wound around the man’s neck—placed loosely enough so that he could breathe normally, tightly enough so that he was forced to hold his head more or less motionless or risk choking himself to death—held his upper body captive while allowing him close to a full range of motion with his head.
Similar straps around the man’s knees and ankles immobilized his lower body, naked from the waist down. Carrie watched with something resembling amusement as he desperately tested the bindings, flexing his arms and legs and bucking in the chair until he realized he was cutting off his air supply by doing so. The confusion in his face began to be replaced by a clear sense of horror. He was trapped and he knew it.
Carrie reached up and pulled off her blonde wig, releasing her mane of auburn hair. It tumbled down to her shoulders. “Remember me now?”
Daniels shook his head vigorously, choking himself and spluttering as he did so. “N-no, I don’t remember you! What the hell are you doing? Are you fucking crazy?”
Carrie Carstens’ eyes hardened. “After everything you did to me, you’re going to sit there and tell me you don’t even remember me?”
“What are you talking about, ya crazy bitch? We just met a couple of hours ago!”
“I’m not talking about tonight. You raped me and destroyed my life ten years ago, and I’ve been looking for you ever since. I knew I’d find you eventually. And now that I have, I plan on making sure that you pay for what you did to me.”
“I never raped anybody,” the man shouted, panicked. “Ten years ago I was thirteen, for chrissakes! You’ve got the wrong guy, I never hurt anybody, just let me go and we’ll pretend this never happened, please just let me go…”
Carrie watched in smug satisfaction as the words tumbled out of the mouth of the man who had broken her. She let him go on and on, begging until he finally realized it would do no good. Of course he would deny his actions; he was a rapist, was it such a stretch to imagine he would be a liar, too?
By the time he finished, red-faced and panting, Carrie had begun readying the next phase of her vengeance. She lifted a circular saw from a table in the corner of the storage room and used four C-clamps to fasten it securely it to a complicated system of steel rods positioned directly above the modified dentist’s chair holding Burton Daniels. When she finished, the saw hung inches above his waist, suspended in the air and angled inward, the blade glittering in the soft light, razor-sharp and deadly.
He had been so busy begging to be released and claiming that she had the wrong man (Yeah, right, sure, did he really think she could forget his miserable face for one goddamned second?) that he didn’t seem to notice what she was doing until she had finished. Now he looked at the positioning of the electric power tool, at his own nakedness, at the thick acoustic insulation lining the walls of his prison, and his eyes bulged in mushrooming terror.
“What are you doing?” he whispered, even though by now it had to have been obvious.
Carrie said nothing, preferring to let him wallow in his fear like she had wallowed in hers for so long.
Then he screamed. Burton Daniels, investment banker trainee and one-time rapist, let loose a bellow that was something between a cry for help and a plea for mercy. He screamed loud and long, the leather strap around his neck preventing him from putting much body language into it, but still, Carrie thought, managing a pretty impressive effort, nevertheless.
Carrie let him do it. She wasn’t worried about anyone hearing and coming to investigate. For one thing, she had rented a storage unit in this location specifically for its isolation. For another, it was now three-thirty a.m. and she felt confident she was the only person awake within a three mile radius. Finally, Carrie had spent considerable time and effort, not to mention money, outfitting this little room with the highest-quality acoustic insulation she could get her hands on, and lots of it.
A cop could be standing right outside with his ear pressed to the door and he would never hear a thing. Carrie knew that for a fact. She had tested the effectiveness of her modifications by blaring a stereo at full volume—some rap shit—and standing on the other side of the door, listening hard. She had heard nothing, not so much as a single bass thump or Eminem whine.
So she didn’t bother trying to deter Burton Daniels from his fruitless attempt at attracting the attention of a potential rescuer. She well knew what it was like to scream until your throat was raw and you couldn’t catch your breath. That might be the only thing she had in common with Burton Daniels, now that she thought about it.
Eventually he recognized that all the yelling was getting him nowhere, or maybe he just exhausted himself. In either case, he abruptly stopped screaming and stared at Carrie, tears streaming down his formerly handsome face, now red and blotchy and ugly, his true nature showing through. “This is insane,” he said, his voice hoarse and scratchy. “I swear I don’t know you. I swear. Please.”
Carrie ignored his pathetic attempt at gaining her sympathy. Where had his sympathy been when she cried herself to sleep only to scream herself awake, night after night after agonizing night, for years and years on end?